… and nullifying your disk encryption. If the key is (permanently) attached to your drive, everyone getting hold of your drive also gets the decryption key for free.
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That is true for most tokens of this style, however the OnlyKeys do need a PIN entered on the token before allowing access to the stored credentials. So if your attacker model does not include someone willing to physically attack the chip on the token that should work well enough for most use cases. I do not think that I am a target for nation state size actors 
Additionally it could just be used as a second factor for better security when detached.
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Here are the Expansion Cards / Tiles I’d like to see.
- Battery to charge another device - take it out of the framework laptop to charge your iPhone/Android, and use only 1 USB C cable to charge both the laptop and battery puck
- Quest 2/3/Pro Direct Wireless Adapter
- Matter/Homekit/Zigbee adapter to work with home automation
- Barcode Scanner - I’m sure Business Units, POS, or Kiosks could make use of this.
I’d also like to see Framework Standardize a possible ‘double width, double usb’ standard, and an ‘single width extended height’ standard before we get fractured implementations.
Is it possible to also fit a wireless m.2 card in the expansion slot?
You would not fit much battery in an expansion card, especially if it has to share space with even the smallest powerbank chips I know of but it would be doable even if not very useful.
For one usb and bluetooth scanners exist in all shapes and sizes so you probably don’t mean that but like an expansion card sized scanner that scans out the bottom or the side or something? The image in my head of someone running around a warehouse scanning stuff with the side of their laptop is kinda funny.
Maybe not m.2 but a fancy usb one might be a neat option. mediatek has a pretty nice 6e usb chipset(mt7921au) that might fit the bill.
You might not need much, but if you could get a 50% quick charge on one phone that might be enough to get you through a long conference day.
Have you seen the funny stuff they bolt onto laptops, tablets, and phones to make some sort of weird enterprise job an option?
- Barcode
- NFC
- Credit Card - CC Reader/ Swpie
- Square / Tap to Pay
I can all see these used as part of some sort of “enterprise” large purchase order for document tracking, insurance adjusters, billing and quoting, kiosk/(point of service) POS, membership tracking, etc…
To get into my local gym, I have to scan a member ID card to the barcode scanner and the laptop is elevated on some custom-built stand.
Since the Framework Expansion Card Internal volume is approximately 29.7mm x 26.7mm x 5mm, it seems like it is just shy of a fit with an M.2 2230(maybe with creativity it would fit), but the M.2 1625 package size would fit for sure.
Other m.2 packages that might fit according to this graphic are:
- 1113-X
- 1216-X
- 1620-X
- 2024-X
- 2226-X
- 2228-X
- 2828-X
I am not sure if the Intel M.2 1625 is a standard or unique from Intel.
Package Specifications
Board Form Factor
M.2 2230, M.2 1625
Package Size
22mm x 30mm x 2.4mm, 16mm x 25mm x 2.0mm
System Interface Type
M.2: CNVio2
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That’s all fine and good except they are pcie so you’d also need thunderbolt/usb4 to pcie circuitry in there which is neither compact or cheap (seriously that stuff is expansive as hell and also pretty hard to implement) so the direct usb option ls a lot easier. And wasting a thunderbolt port for wifi is just wastefull as all hell.
Imo, this cnvio bs should go die in a fire and also likely won’t work through thunderbolt. It’s not faster than regular pcie, it’s not more power efficient than regular pcie, the modules are just slightly cheaper to manufacture but in exchange only work with certain cpus. Goof for oems that can save a few cents per device, not so good for the consumer who has a wifi card that only works on certain devices.
mt7921au usb with external antennas could fit pretty comfortably inside an expansion card.
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You aren’t fitting anywhere near 50% of a normal phone worth of battery in there, let alone with quick charge electronics.
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Also, I bet a lot of people would love to be able to use M.2 2230 standard devices in the expansion slot, even if it sticks out just a bit from the laptop, and being able to use an M.2 2280 in a double wide slot, if that becomes possible in the future, would be really cool too!
Hopefully, before too long, Framework gets a better sense of what people want to use the expansion slots for and improve the standard and size possibilities to make most of them possible. If we are lucky, the slot expansion will then become a more broadly adopted standard.
I think missing 2230 and 2280 out of the gate was a big miss.
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I do believe that, that doesn’t make it any more practical.
Not really since you can’t practically use them anyway even if they would fit.
maybe with USB-C, but I thought you could do PCIe across Thunderbolt 3/USB-C?
You can indeed do that, but that is bulky (even the smallest implementations I know of are multiple times bigger than an expansion card), expensive (I have jet to find something that does that for <80$ retail), pretty complicated to implement and not really tuned for power efficiency.
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I would like to see:
- A single expansion card with dual USB-C ports
- either a 2.5gbps or the normal 1gbps network port that does not protrude out. I have seen some laptop designs where there is a folding out mechanism to keep the port slim
- a high end DAC/amp for audiophile quality headphones
- an SD card reader
Welcome to the forum.
Framework is working on a full-size SD reader.
A community member is working on one. Dual USB-C ports but due to space constraints it’s USB 3.1 Gen1 (5 Gbps), no DisplayPort, no charging (no USB-PD).
Dual USB-C Expansion Card - #266 by tbe
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I could definitely get behind this. Or better still, one that has a USB port plus an internal space for one of these mini-dongles. (Sunk in or not for the external one doesn’t bother me - I’d just like to not have to waste a port for my headphones.)
It would probably not be able to have a nice clean plastic cover between the expansion card and the computer, and one might even have to do some nasty things to the plastic case around the dongle, but if the idea is to make the dongle a semi-permanent addition to the laptop I’m not sure that’s too terrible (though that definitely moves it into “unofficial add-ons for nerds like me” territory rather than something Framework would likely sell).
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Would like to see blank/ empty expansion cards and nano SIM card adapters.
USB-C cards are already super simple, cheap to make, and consume no power when nothing’s connected, so I doubt it would be worth the cost of setting up production lines for those compared to just using USB-C cards.
A 3rd party company is already making one.
Unfortunately it is pretty limited. In doesn’t support aggregation (combining multiple signals to boost performance), 256qam (boosts performance in low interference environments), 4x4 MIMO (multiple antennas working together to boost performance), and has limited frequency support (hurting performance/range).
Although I doubt a Framework official module would be significantly better without being way more expensive.
One of these might interest you two.
A few designs in this thread.
Then a dual port option
@Chunmeista (just adding a ping because I don’t know if a quote within another quote will actually notify someone)
They’d just need to sell the cases of the storage cards separately without the electronics. I think these would be super useful for DIY projects, even if they’d be probably the same price as the USB-C expansion cards.