What new Expansion Card types do you want to see released?

OMG YES. So much this! If it is possible it would turn my laptop into a crash cart while in the datacenter.

It could also be useful for setting hobby raspberry pi boards and the like.

I see it has been said before.

This is a little far out, but would it be possible to have an HDMI in to the laptopā€™s screen?

Welcome to the forum! TLDR, not really with the IO structure of the laptop, iirc the thing that prevents that is using usb4/TB4 for all of the ports that go into the adapter

It might be possible to build an HDMI capture device into an expansion card.
You could then either just display the stream or even composite/record it on the laptop. On the other hand, there will be a lot more latency than if you had a native HDMI input to the screen.

There have been some ridiculously tiny KVM devices recently which provide HDMI signal capture among other things.

uhhh maybe. iirc the size and thermal profile of an expansion card doesnt allowed for it, iirc it was discussed earlier in the thread

yes but no real server use HDMI. If you need a bluescreen cart, you need VGA. Startech does sell one, but its not cheap.

I get it you can like, KVM your desktop and whatever and thatā€™s cool. But there isnā€™t really a big market for them.

Perhaps, but say that you were to solder wires directly to the display board, and then perhaps those to pogo pins on the card? All wildly hypothetical btw

You can do a lot if youā€™re willing to invest enough effort. But there is the question of if itā€™s worth it.

I think feeding directly into the display would have problems. And just tapping in would be a lot of effort to begin with. The display cables arenā€™t made up of plain wires. Each wire is micro-coax to maintain signal integrity. Thatā€™s not easy to solder. In addition, laptop motherboard display connectors donā€™t follow a standard pinout, so the cables are custom. You canā€™t just buy a splitter cable compatible with the FW mainboard connector.

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Fair enough. Thanks to everyone who responded for your feedback!

I would love a secondary wifi card with an external antenna connector for longer-range and dual wifi-nic applications

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this is awesome, I like it

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Oculink for connecting storage and eGPU

Retractable USB-C cable that fits in an expansion card

Often I just want to connect things like my flipper zero, iphone or ssd and dislike that i have to carry around a cable.
I know there is not a lot of space :slight_smile:

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Yeah, there is basically no room for any sort of mechanism which would allow thatā€¦ It would be MUCH larger than the expansion card slot, likely sticking both down and out

Maybe you could get away with hiding a tiny adapter like this, and put like 0,5 cm of cable in between the connectors, so it can come out just enough to plug in to something and be flexible enough not to brake.

https://www.amazon.de/Duttek-unterstĆ¼tzt-VideoĆ¼bertragung-kompatibel-Thunderbolt-silber/dp/B09L4GXQZX

Card with dual 3.5mm TRS audio-jacks instead of the single TRRS headset-jack. One TRS-jack thatā€™s input-only, the other being output-only. Have a pair of DIP-switches. One that toggles whether the audio-out is configured as a headphone-jack or line-out, and the other DIP switch to toggle whether the audio in is configured as a mic-jack or a line-in. My dream version of this card would also have the components for support of the 3.5 mm version of TosLink cables, too. This would, for me at least, be far more usable than the stock TRRS 3.5mm audio card

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I am pretty sure there are USB audio codecs supporting multiple input/outputs.