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

[James_Meagher]

Thunderbolt 4, so I can use my eGPU.

[iFreilicht]

I would love the microcontroller expansion card! It would be very important that it’s failure-resistant and isolated from the rest of the laptop though. I wouldn’t want to fry my laptop because I accidentally shorted ground and 5V on the GPIO And I’m very curious what the connector would look like. Will a regular two-row 0.1” female pin header fit?

For everyone asking for Thunderbolt: The CPU already supports it by default on its USB-C ports, however in another thread @nrp said that they were not allowed to comment on that before the device passed testing and certification. As the USB-C modules are just passivepass-throughs, I think it’s very likely that the laptop will be Thunderbolt capable.

@diggles would this be doable using the microcontroller expansion card? A lot of these buses don’t seem to have standard connectors anyway, so just having an adapter-cable from GPIO to the desired bus seems very possible.

@ManUtopiK This sounds like an SDR (software-defined radio) right? I’m not sure about the legal implications here, you’re not allowed to send on a lot of frequencies. The RTL2832U seems like a decently compact option here, but I’m not sure the circuitry could fit into an expansion slot.

[diggles]

@iFreilicht, microcontroller is quite a broad term. Although it could work, it would probably be more of a hack, than a solution.

Most of the applications I suggested above use DB-9 or RJ-45 connectors. Others would just want wire clips on the end of a banana plug lead. The main difference between many of them is either the signalling (e.g. 485 uses differential signalling) or clock timing (some Allen Bradley DH or DF1 etc), or voltage (HART is 24VDC with a superimposed signal over the power supply lines). Isolation is usually desired as to not fry your computer - as you have alluded to.

[Patrick_Payne]

It would be good to provide expansion cards that are just empty cases, would make for interesting DIY projects. A picoblade or similar header could be provided for the USB pins. Alternatively an expansion card that is essentially an empty box with a USBC port in them could be used for things like wireless mouse receivers / yubikeys etc. that remain plugged in more or less permanently, so you can avoid having them stick out the side of the laptop.

[mark_schaefer]

Small battery modules would be neat if you were traveling and needed to eek out some additional battery life.

[Edward_Gray]

How about a double expansion card, with hub features?

What I am thinking of would use both expansion slots on one side of the laptop and would extend past the laptop edge, allowing for four or more connections on one side of the device.
External keyboard, monitor, mouse, and something else.
Would probably be ok for lower data flow usage.
For higher data volume, use the single connections on the other side.

[Derek_Kulp]

As others have mentioned, an ethernet expansion card would be be a must. I’m a network engineer and having to carry around USB to ethernet adapters suck, even worse are these thin laptops that have limited IO and I have to get a a USB C to USB A HUB to then plug in a USB to ethernet adapter sucks.

On top of that, there are times when I need to be plugged into multiple networks at the same time. Standing in a data center with a USB c to USB A hub with 3+ ethernet dongles hanging off of the hub so I can be plugged into a WAN router, switch, and SAN switch all at the same time sucks. So being able to throw in 3 ethernet expansion cards would be awesome.

[Kimberlee_Model]

@Adrien_Rey-Jarthon

Maybe a bit too specific but one thing that sounds possible with this and I would like is a simple USB-A port going slightly inside the laptop, so we could leave all kind of small dongles like logitech unifying on without them raising out of the laptop, or even an “internal” USB port with a closable plastic lid so the receiver is hidden inside and the laptop appears flat and port-less.

+1 million for an internal USB A

Also interested in 10gbit ethernet, (or 1 gbit if that’s too ambitious). I put in a pre-order cuz I think it’s a neat concept. But it’d be nearly useless to me without an ethernet.

Dual USB (a and c) would be nice too, as would RS-232 and similar.

[Moonwayv]

@mark_schaefer

Small battery modules would be neat if you were traveling and needed to eek out some additional battery life.

I’m pretty sure tiny batteries the size of an expansion card would not give more than 5 minutes of battery life, I think for this kind of use case a regular powerbank would be way more useful

[matthew3]

I would love to see a double-height card.

Seriously. Maybe it needs to be taken off to throw the laptop in a bag (but that’s easy, right?), but having “legs” would be good for ventilation, and I expect the extra physical space would be hugely useful. RJ45 jack with no folding, maybe dual ports, and you could even do clever things like have a port sticking out front/back (relative to the laptop) rather than the side.

[nrp]

Double height would be great. I thought about 3D printing some foldable feet for extra height. It should be doable!

[Aaron_Stone]

Along the lines of a microcontroller card, I’d be interested in an ARM CPU that could be used for running ARM applications natively on the machine. Obviously there’s not a ton of space for a super high-powered chip, but an Raspberry Pi 4-equivalent would be sufficient for dev work.

AWS has been rolling out ARM servers and adoption rates are high, so there’s a need to build for both amd64 and arm64 that is going to become more salient over time.

Edit: Same again for RISC-V. Having a local machine to run native code is super useful.

[Robert_G_Litz_Jr]

A ATSAME51J19 would be an interesting choice for a microcontroller with a 2 MB SPI FLASH chip. IT has Cortex M4 Core with floating point support and 512KB Flash and 192KB RAM. It could provide a number of I/O choices including I2C, CAN Bus, I2S input and output, SERCOM, PWM, and ADC. IT also has a built in crypto engines with AES (256 bit), true RNG, Pubkey controller. With the SPI Flash Chip it could run Micropython as well and Arduino Code With a UF2 bootloader.

[Joseph_Black]

NFC and RFID, Thunderbolt, SDR (software defined radio), yubikey, HSM, arm microcontroller, ethernet, fpga, LoRa module, Ubertooth

[Whinis]

Honestly multiple USB-A per slot. While I love that this is fully repairable and replaceable “upgrading” to this would set me back nearly 5 ports. Current laptop has Power (separate), sd card, 3 audio jacks, 4 usb ports, hdmi, 2 display ports. Being limited to just 4 ports and one of them must be used for charging means that I have lost most of my laptop.

[Miles_Brocha]

I would love to see a smart card/badge reader type of expansion or default integration for larger modules in the future! I would definitely buy one if that was an option!

[Alex_O_Donnell]

@nrp

The Microcontroller Expansion Card prototype we developed actually does have UART and i2c broken out to the edge along with 3.3V power.

That’s a neat idea. I use UART and JTAG/SWD all day long, imagine an expansion card with something like an STLINK V3 module in it. UART with or without 232 or 485 txcvrs would be great.

[Ian_Comings]

RS-232 COMM port for connecting to routers and switches. or maybe some kind of adapter port for it.

[Ian_Darwin]

DB-25 parallel port for my 20-year-old HP laser printer that just keeps on printing and printing, like a certain ad bunny.

[Edward_Gray]

HP LaserJet 4 Plus, with networking and Postscript and expanded memory. I think it needs new feed rubbers, since it jams a little too often, when printing more than a page or two.