I ordered two of the monoprice adapters to try just now. I get my laptop tomorrow. I’ll try em out when I get em in a week.
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I’m excited about the prospect of a microcontroller card, it would aid in the development of physical hardware especially with UAVs. The ability to directly interface with i2c, pwm, and uart components would be invaluable.
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Yes, but the problem is that each IDE (or design suite) have its own proprietary thing and you will be hard-pressed making something for all of them or for none of them.
It’s probably a bit niche, and given the vendor probably impossible but… I have a Logitech G935 headset, that I use with my PC. There is a minimally functional open source configuration program to get things like the sidetone/loopback set up on linux but not much more than that. The dongle is a USB-A thing, of course.
IF (and it’s a big if) a dongle for this kind of headset could be made, especially if it could spoof the pairing that goes on in the background for it, that would be great. It’d be a big project because I’m sure Logitech would be no help at all, but it would be pretty great. Well beyond my skill level, though. I should probably just buy a bluetooth headset lol
I see that it kind of went into direction of whatever expansion card you can think of, so I will add my weird niche suggestion: a vacuum tube tester.
I’m throwing my hat in the ring for some kind of capture card, as had been mentioned previously, with the primary use case of bringing up things like Raspberry Pis in the lab where displays are hard to come by. Often it would be great to just be able to plug the display output of a Pi into my laptop and work through things that way. (I realize this is what ssh is for, but when you’re deploying a lot of Pis on an enterprise network, it’s a pain to find the MAC address for each one without a display)
These are a little crazy when a $20-50 USB-A or USB-C dongle can do the job.
@Ethan_Spoelstra Is that capability limited to the GPD? Would you be able to do the same thing right now with the Framework?
It requires specific internal wiring to route the USB and video signals so probably won’t be possible on the Framework without a different motherboard setup, but you can do something with a Raspberry Pi (zero/zeroW/4) and PiKVM or TinyPilot pretty easily and access their web interface from the Framework.
@Ethan_Spoelstra That would require carrying a PiKVM or TinyPilot around with me if I wanted to bring up multiple Pis on site no? To me it seems simpler to have an expansion card that would provide capture card functionality that I can pop in my Framework when I know I’m going to want to access a display output. I avoid having to figure out how to reliably power a Pi, and I don’t have to have one for every Pi I’m troubleshooting.
Hey I would like to table an idea,
An expansion card that has a self contained AP+VPN like what these guys do:
Using only the USB-C power ports and connecting to it via wifi. A lot of remote workers now have the requirement to vpn into home base and this would be great for preventing any “leaks”
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Open hardware security keys like SoloKeys might be a good option for this: it’d require a different form factor than their current products, but, for example, someone could design a SoloKey variant that had a button nearly flush with the side of the expansion card (either a regular button, or slightly recessed to prevent accidental presses…), and maybe a pop-out button or other mechanism for removing/disabling the key when away from the laptop. (Just removing the expansion card might be easy enough; I don’t have a Framework to play with so I’m not sure what the ergonomics are like.)
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I’d love to see a logic analyzer or maybe just a UART socket for us hardware hackers
Might be a bit far fetched but I still love the thought: a built-in Starlink WiFi card that connects the laptop to the satellites and access much faster and reliable Internet (and everything else). I know that is doesn’t exist yet, but, a man can dream?
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We could get Elon involved 
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Seeing what he’s doing with Teslas, I highly doubt he is on board with Framework’s mission statement.
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I want a push-button LED indicator for battery life. Bonus if it can be combined with a USB-C port in a single expansion card.
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Forgive me if it wouldn’t but theoretically having thicker expansion cards would work with a bigger space between the laptop and whatever surface you set it on. I know you can only do so much with the rubber feet but maybe something magnetic and removable as a workaround, like spacers that sit on or around the current feet? Shoes for the feet if you will!
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I just had a thought of possibly a port with dedicated mic/headphone ports or maybe even an eSATA port (if thats even possible).
Another thing I’ve thought about is a touch-enabled slider of some form, sorta like the touch sensors you see on true-wireless earbuds.
A framework-supported SNACK module would also be cool to see on the marketplace.
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