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

Creators & Developers Expansion Card
792

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.

793

I see it has been said before.

794

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

795

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

796

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.

797

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

798

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 that’s cool. But there isn’t really a big market for them.

799

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

800

You can do a lot if you’re willing to invest enough effort. But there is the question of if it’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 aren’t made up of plain wires. Each wire is micro-coax to maintain signal integrity. That’s not easy to solder. In addition, laptop motherboard display connectors don’t follow a standard pinout, so the cables are custom. You can’t just buy a splitter cable compatible with the FW mainboard connector.

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801

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

802

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

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803

this is awesome, I like it

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