I was looking for touchscreens on panelook.com and found this one: 服务器故障 It’s 298.4mm × 218.75mm × 2.3mm (H×V×D), uses a 40 pin epd connector and is in production. It’s also got a higher resolution: 3000 x 2000.
The official FW display is 289.993 × 212.28 × 2.1 and also uses a 40 pin epd connector. The panelook page for it is here: 服务器故障
The size difference isn’t trivial, but maybe it’s close enough to work with some very minor bezel modifications? I imagine also, depending on the location of the epd port, we’d need a slightly longer display cable. I don’t (yet) own a FW but would love to try this out if it were at all feasible.
There’s also this one: 服务器故障. It’s closer to the original size, actually being a bit smaller (285.4 × 211.9 × 3.11 (H×V×D)). Also a slight upgrade in resolution to 2400x1600. But there’s the small matter of it being listed as discontinued…
These are all very good finds, but unfortunately either you or somebody else would need to guinea pig it to find out for sure.
Assuming the connector is the same and the panel fits in the Framework top enclosure, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. I just wonder if the display bracket with the screws and such would transfer easily, as well as if the added thickness of the digitizer would lead to a pressure buildup with the bezel.
Additionally, the higher resolution could possibly lead to more power draw, though it should still be compatible.
Would it be worth it to the community to do a gofundme for the testing? If nobody here can spot a technical reason why this wouldn’t work, I’d be willing to give it a try. That said, I don’t have any expertise in the subject and if someone else is more qualified to try it, I’d contribute to their trying instead.
Displays in general are a massive PITA to work with, even as an OEM it’s like pulling teeth trying to documentation on any given screen, that’s not a joke it is easier to get access to the pinout of Intel Celeron and Atom processors than it is to get a meaningful datasheet from a display vendor.
There’s a lot of issues at hand and it’s not safe to just swap in a random display, you can damage the display you’re installing and you can also damage the main board. It might use an ePD connector, but that doesn’t mean the pinout or voltage is the same. Mobile device connection ports are not standardized like computer monitors are. You have a few different protocols, of course such as LVDS, ePD, etc. Even if you managed by miracle to find a screen with the exact same voltages and pinouts as the official screen, unless they have already integrated a touch controller into the board, it’s not going to work.
And this isn’t even getting into the fact that both LVDS and ePD screens often utilize the same connectors but are completely incompatible with one another and there’s no real way to tell just by counting the number of pins or the connector type.
Realistically, this is something that would require frame.work to design into their mainboard. It is possible to reverse engineer the screen, but that’s going to be fairly expensive and time consuming while a more affordable alternative would be simply adding a digitizer to the existing screen.
To do that you are going to need make a touch controller as well which isn’t particularly difficult, you could probably just use an STM32 micro controller and connect it to a USB port.
As much as I would love to take you up on that gofundme offer, just buy a touch overlay (which is just a pre-made version of what I described) and slap it on your existing screen:
Actually the links I included above have links to datasheets for each display. You have to register an account before downloading the full pdf data sheet which I haven’t done yet, but that appears to be free. I don’t have the background to interpret them but it sounds like you might? Obviously can’t vouch for how meaningful they are.
EDIT: Well, registration is free, but downloading files requires either a paid membership or earning “P-coins” by either uploading files like photos or datasheets yourself. Which explains how they have so many datasheets.
As for the driver, (at)nrp is on the record saying the display port supports touch, it just wasn’t on any roadmap of theirs last summer: Touchscreen that can use a stylus (for creative people) - #17 by nrp. I took that to mean some form of touch controller is present in the main board (though I obviously could be reading too much into that)
I mean, it might have one. It’s one of those things where, yeah, it might work, crazier things have happened, and I might just be biased from working with LVDS, but as a general rule you can’t just interchange screens like that.
eDP is a little more standardized than LVDS, but it’s not like HDMI where it’s guaranteed to work and not damage your screen or computer. You would probably be okay if you did plug one in, but it’s a $1,000 computer, and the touch screen probably won’t work because eDP is DisplayPort. DisplayPort doesn’t have touch screen functionality, so that is almost certainly going to be using vendor specific pins. If you’re going to do that, I would take a multimeter and find the power and ground pins at a minimum and make sure those line up with the pinout of the screen because the last thing you want is 16v passing through the data lines on your motherboard
Those dimensions are probably a bit too big, especially the depth of the panel as it’s practically right up against the aluminium lid and the bezel will have to be correctly seated. There is less than a centimetre between the screen and the lid width and height wise.
Obviously it’s the wrong way around in this case, but wouldn’t you be able to plug a 2-lane eDP panel into a 4-lane eDP motherboard?
(unless eDP works differently than PCIe in this regard - PCIe being able to do this is exactly why I figured that such a thing is even possible in the first place)
Any lead on one that’s the correct size and aspect ratio? I’m having a surprisingly hard time finding any aside from the 16:9 (I think) ones you link to here, though that might just be not knowing the proper terms they’re marketed under. Googling “touch overlay” “digitizer film” etc just keep getting me replacement led/digitizer for other machines…
The framework has the edp pins for i2c or USB touch screen, but the mainboard uses a non standard pin out (I don’t actually believe the mainboard side has an actual standard in the industry, just for the panel side). The edp cable they sell (or the one included with the panels) has the standard 40 pin edp pin out on the panel side, but does not have the wires in that cable for USB or i2c that go from the mainboard side to the panel side of the edp cable.
So you would need a custom edp cable with the custom framework main board connector that goes to the standard edp display side.
I took a panel from a dell 9700 (16:10 4k) and connected it to the mainboard using the framework edp cable you can purchase in the market place. The panel uses a 0.4mm edp connector while framework cable is 0.5mm so I had to source a 0.5mm female to 0.4mm male edp adapter to get it to hook up.
Still working out how to get the touch panel to work. The panel has the TP control board with a 10 pin connector but the framework edp cable doesn’t have the wires for the i2c or USB connection to the mainboard.
