Note that you'll need some fasteners to install everything (see https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Fasteners+Guide/106 for all fastener types)

  - 5x Mainboard fasteners - M1.6 1.5mm fastener with a 5.5mm diameter T5 head and 0.6mm thread pitch
  - 3x Audio Board and WiFi card fasteners - M2 3.0mm fastener with a 4.5mm diameter T5 head and 0.7mm thread pitch

These arent ISO metric thread pitches. Why not use standard fasteners? I cant find these to buy anywhere online (even with different heads) - even your own website doesnt stock them...

EDIT: looks like im not the only one to ask - theres an unanswered question on that guide since Apr 2 asking the same thing.

This is most likely an error in our fasteners guide (which I wrote, so it's on me). I just sanity checked one of the M2 fasteners with calipers, and it does indeed follow the ISO standard 0.4mm pitch. We'll double check the numbers we listed for pitch.

For the 3D printed cases, for simplicity we didn't design in threaded inserts, so you can use self-tapping M2 or M1.6 fasteners with approximately the right length and head size and it'll work.

I find under-sizing the holes a bit and hitting the screws with a heat gun before picking them up with a magnetic screwdriver and screwing them in works really well.

Undersizing holes is just a brilliant way to ask for cracks down the road.

not if the screw melts the plastic, the same way heated threaded insert would?

Thanks for checking - I thought it would be a strange thing to do given the product messaging.

> All you need to do is insert memory, plug in a USB-C power adapter, and hit the tiny power button on-board, and you’ve got a powered-up computer.

That's brilliant. Do you see potential for this becoming popular as a "Raspberry Pi on steroids"? Any future plans to encourage that kind of ecosystem?

We certainly hope so. As we look at the ~5 year view of this and have a substantial number of Mainboards in the wild that have been upgraded out of Framework Laptops, we want to do everything we can to foster an ecosystem of methods to re-use them. We actually announced a giveaway of 100 Mainboards to developers as part of the release today to help bootstrap this: https://forms.gle/RegGHe6R4H5cEstH9

Thanks for supporting long-lived hardware. One existing favorite is the classic Lenovo X230/X430 series, which has seen several mods over the years, with a healthy resale market.

Do you plan to offer Pro/Enterprise CPUs (Intel vPro, Ryzen Pro), for h/w security features like memory encryption or Windows secured core / VBS?

For open-source firmware and kernel/hypervisor development, it would be good to have a serial port header.

The i7-1185G7 SKU supports vPro: https://frame.work/products/mainboard?v=FRANFG000C

We also have some additional debug support through a header that we've documented here: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/EmbeddedController

Awesome idea! Looking forward to seeing the projects that come out of this giveaway, and I hope my idea gets selected as well :)

People are already using them in place of lattepandas etc for cyberdeck builds.

https://youtu.be/y8jiYl0CzKc

As far as I can tell, it has no output pins. So it's not comparable to Raspberry Pi (or other ARM SBCs). More akin maybe to an Android TV box? Short of making something through USB - you can't make your own header boards or easily hook up sensors and whatnot

Technically you can use the 50 pin header we have for the input system for GPIO, i2c, and USB. The webcam and display headers also have i2c and USB: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Mainboard/blob/main/Ele...

The GPIO would require EC firmware development, but it is technically possible: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/EmbeddedController

Is this on the ribbon cable? Okay with a breakout board, this would be really interesting and offer something quite unique

It's actually open space right now in the market. It's an annoyance/limitation that the easiest current way to do i2c/gpio/etc hardware-y stuff involves moving to ARM/Rpi. There aren't any real easy solutions for x86 and hobbyists. I had a friend who worked in touchdesigner (which is x64 only) and it was always a bit annoying he couldn't hook say LED strips directly to his laptop and to touchdesigner (so people spend a small fortune on DMX lights). We ended up doing wifi + esps. But that's much more fragile..

Maybe ideally you'd have a header on the side of laptop kinda like the Rpi400?

But even a separate machine/baseboard would still be awesome in the hobby and education sphere

We recently built a product that utilizes FTDI chips for i2c/gpio/jtag/spi/swd-protocol support. My dev kits and bench setup uses the Adafruit FTDI breakout boards (https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264) to connect to various other circuitry. The driver and even the communication protocols are documented and open source (e.g. OpenOCD implemented their own based on the USB packets). The breakout board doesn't have 40-50 GPIO pins an RPI has, but you can hook multiple of these breakout boards to a computer. I am using 4 breakout boards with one ARM SBC each as targets, with no problems on an Intel NUC. And they are much smaller and easier to get than a RPi.

Besides the FT232H, there are larger FTDI chips with more channels. I am uncertain if one can find USB breakout boards for them, though.

oh that's really cool. What's the driver situation with something like that? On Linux do I just write to some file and it's mapped to some hardware pins? Or it's more complicated than that?

For something this powerful, you might make it into a while-house automation controller or large CNC machine, and you probably wouldn't want to hook up the IO directly to the main CPU... You'd use Ethernet for distributed IO, maybe I2C for local IO (combined with something like this: https://www.adafruit.com/product/732, which would provide much more powerful, ESD-tolerant, robust, 5V-capable inputs and outputs). A tiny handful of 3V3, low-current IO are not particularly useful for realistic use-cases. Heck, even the Beaglebone, with its 1 GHz Arm A8 and 512 MB RAM has a pair of separate microcontrollers ("PRUs") for real-time IO on the SOC.

I wish there were some higher-speed, lower-level local busses for communication with subprocessors and other IO (SPI, CAN, etc), but Ethernet is fine.

The RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico) has a similar feature, two programmable IO cores.

Not for distributed use, but you can interface with USB and still have real-time signal generation.

Maybe not so much a raspberry pi as a Mac Mini or other kind of small non-laptop form factor system; I'm sure that, especially with these plans, someone can make a VESA-compatible mount.

From the blog post accompanying the release: "In addition to 2D drawings of the Mainboard to help you design your projects, we’ve released two 3D-printable reference designs. One is a minimal VESA-mount holder that lets you attach the Mainboard to a monitor or TV, while the other is a fully featured small form factor desktop case."

Will there be information on important parameters of the main board/PCB? I'm not exactly talking about physical dimensions or enclosure design itself - but as a mechanical engineer I have no idea what sort of safe flexural tolerance a PCB might have, or if there's some available data on shock and drop tolerances of the board.

Also a quick qn 2 - any plans for a "smaller" board (maybe v2/later)? The current size is fine for a laptop but not ideal if someone is looking for building a tablet/small cyberdeck style device.

Great question on the additional parameters. I'll take that back to our mechanical engineering team.

Thanks!

No questions but I'm very impressed there is a 3D printed case in this repository and it's designed for home 3D printers (ie. split into smaller parts, printable without supports)

Sorry for the tangent, but any plans to open sales to Australia and New Zealand soon? I personally know a handful of people who will buy this and the laptop if given a chance.

I am also waiting to get a Framework in NZ. Hopefully they will partner with a local company to provide support. Having a repairable laptop is all very well, but not if we had to wait 6 weeks for the part to arrive.

Not really a Mainboard related question..... But I also wonder if it is possible for Framework to offer a global shipping option? I would totally handle import tax and customs fees etc myself if such option becomes available.

Any component which has an electricity or wireless "uplink" will require regulatory approval before entering a market.

Just "shipping" is not good enough if you are a hardware producer who cares whether the product can be legally operated in a country.

Understood.

However, I think maybe there are ways to achieve delivery even if the manufacturer is not operating in the destination country? Maybe through a third-party partner such as Amazon?

This Chromebook (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YMM4YC1/) for example, ships from the US and can be delivered straight to my hand even Google don't actually operate here.

Currently, if I want to buy the laptop, I have to hire a courier company to proxy the package (from their US warehouse to the destination country), the company will handle import and customs. But given the nature of the business, the package might be damaged or lost, and when it did, I might only get the courier fee refunded.

Amazon on the other hand, almost never fail, and even if they did fail, I can still get all my money back.

I would totally pay a small premium to get my laptop and other hardware safely delivered. So... I hope Framework consider this.

They gave a IMO good overview of the difficulties of selling to a new country in a previous post :

> With our supply improving, you may be wondering when you can order a laptop if you’re outside of the US and Canada. We selected and are bringing up our worldwide warehousing and fulfillment partner, which is one very key part of the equation, but it takes quite a lot more than that to enable a complete experience in each country. Picking Germany as one example, we need German language keyboards, a Type F power cable, in-box paperwork and labeling in German, localization for the Framework website, support documentation, and checkout flow, support for local payment methods, calculation of Euro prices and taxes, accounting support for German income, creation of legally sound Terms of Sale, Privacy, and Warranty policies for Germany, CE certifications, a local Authorized Representative to back up the certifications, determination of HS codes and tariffs, an Importer of Record to be able to deliver duty paid, German-language in-time-zone customer support, reverse logistics and RMA support for returns and repairs, region-specific sourcing of off the shelf memory and storage, trial builds of German laptops prior to production, and back-end ERP infrastructure to tie all of this together. That sounds like a lot, but it’s actually a drastically simplified summary.

https://frame.work/ca/en/blog/scaling-up-infrastructure

> Picking Germany as one example, we need German language keyboards,

Australia and NZ are easier because there is no new language involved (both use English); unlike UK, there isn’t even a different keyboard layout, both using the US English layout (but I suppose some people in the UK would be happy to buy it even if it had a US keyboard.) The only physical hardware change required would be a different mains power cord. Some of the other issues (regulatory/tax/currency/customs/etc) would still exist, but cutting the language issue out must simplify things.

Delivery and taxes are the smallest of all problems. When you bring devices into general circulation you have to follow the law for these devices on local grounds. Trading partners can indeed do the necessary qualifications for that, but it is the same bells and whistles. You can avoid it secretly (aka. Pay a courier and hope that the customs officer does not check the certifications on the product). If you as a user use it and the product behaves badly you can get seriously fined (e.g. disturbance of the radio spectrum).

It is costly, very time consuming (think months to years) and very risky (the authorities often reject things and you need to go back to the drawing board) to do it the official way.

I'm one of them. Such a shame that we can't get them here in Aus. I very nearly ordered it through a re-shipper system. If AusPost still did theirs, I would've!

When you're ready to expand in APAC, please add Singapore too!

I got mine via vPost, no problems.

This looks absolutely incredible, and given the supply issues with Intel's NUCs, couldn't have come at a better time!

Do you have an estimate of when the Framework Marketplace will be available for UK customers? Currently Marketplace links redirect to the UK homepage, and is only accessible after manually selecting "United States" as a country.

We're currently setting up the logistics infrastructure for the Marketplace for UK and EU. We'll have waitlist functionality open sooner so that you can at least browse the product catalog though.

Amazing — thank you!

The experience is a little rough with the redirect, and I'd love it if I could put an email somewhere for a reminder when it launches. Otherwise though I'm really looking forward to ordering soon!

Many of us prefer larger laptops and find 13.5" too small for regular use. If a larger body were developed there would presumably be space for additional battery in addition to a larger keyboard and screen, maybe even more ports or extra devices[0]. Alternatively the system could be used as a screen-tablet with a wireless keyboard. Were either of these form factor changes considered as a potential design path during development? Do you have any plans to provide these as options in future? Presumably other than sourcing the panel, larger inbuilt keyboard and machining alternate cases neither option would be substantially difficult.

[0] Expansion card program at https://community.frame.work/c/developer-program/expansion-c... shows ethernet, cellular, wireless charging.

More ports would require another mainboard sku. But yeah I'd love a 15+ inch with 6 ports and more battery.

Why? The ports don't need to be independent host-side channels. Worst case the addition of one extra embedded USB-C hub should allow almost any number of ports and devices to be added.

Agreed, I also am not interested in anything not at least close to 16 inches.

("That's what she said"?)

It's cool that the repo has 3D printable cases. But are there any plans of officially making and selling a "ThinkPad killer" chassis where the laptop is more durable, has TrackPoint, and classic keyboard?

I'd love to see a TrackPoint option, and so would many other prospective customers.

https://community.frame.work/t/any-chance-of-trackpoint/1026

Lenovo is doing the opposite of what Framework is doing by soldering down memory and making ThinkPads less repairable. Framework has a great opportunity to take in disillusioned ThinkPad customers who are only staying with Lenovo because of the TrackPoint.

+1. I badly want a modern interpretation of a Thinkpad that is true to its IBM roots. 7 rows, trackpoint, 3 mouse buttons, toughness, drain holes, and a silly amount of ports.

Edit: And I want my ThinkLight back! It's not enough to light the keys from underneath -- the ThinkLight was great for giving a little glow around the laptop to light the working area up a bit when in a darkened room. I did a lot of homework under a ThinkLight. And extra points if we can make it shine in red!

More durable being the key point here. Anecdotally I remember reading horror stories once ppl upgrade about the cooling.

Hello! Happy Framework laptop owner here.

Any plan to release an AMD alternative mainboard?

Very interested in this too. I would actually replace the Intel mainboard in my framework laptop and then use it for something else.

Here's a great discussion in the community forum about AMD alternatives, and why the company, especially at such an early stage, might refrain from discussion, etc. I don't speak for the company, just a fan.

https://community.frame.work/t/amd-cpus-an-open-letter-to-th...

How is the thermal management? It's a notoriously difficult part of a design. Thinkpads for example tend to excel and Dell tends to fail miserably.

Does it get very hot in your lap for example?

According to the thermometer right now: 50°C

Sometimes it reaches 75%

It's not hot by computer standards per se, but since it's built out of aluminum, there are moments when you wouldn't want to have it on your lap because it would be somewhat painful. Specially with some heavy compilation going on

I like the idea of x86 SBCs because of ARM SBC issues with the lack of SBSA, while x86 computers ship with ACPI support.

Now when are the AMD mainboards coming? ;)

Yes, I am waiting for the AMD version, as well. No doubt a lot of us are.

Gotta say I was disappointed when the first ones out were Intel.

I'm in the same boat. When AMD mainboard will be out, I am planning to stuff the Intel one into a Fractal case and just have another server for the home server zoo.

So was I, as I was in the market for a new computer when they came out. Hopefully they'll jump on Zen 4 when it comes out.

Any plans to adopt Coreboot or provide documentation and support to developers who want to port Coreboot to your mainboards?

We've handed three systems that can boot unsigned bootloaders to folks in the coreboot community. Our plan in the near term is to help them create a shim loader that can be signed to run on any Framework Laptop, which then enables anyone to do further coreboot development.

Just want to chime in with some appreciation. Phenomenal work your doing for tech with ethics.

2 questions:

1) When are you planning to launch in India?

2) Have you thought about launching your own Linux distro optimized for Framework? You could upgrade Linux desktop experience. That would be awesome.

There are already far too many distros (and DEs) out there. Working with the commons would be a far better approach.

Once you start getting into specific hardware optimizations you are basically throwing up your hands on the interoperable approach that is a strength of Linux. There is no reason why those changes can't be upstreamed.

Please don't ask for their own Linux distro. Upstreamimg their hardware drivers is enough. Their resources are better spent innovating at the hardware level. And upstream support for frame.work hardware means frame.work users can take advantage of all the innovation happening in the linux ecosystem because all distros would run on it.

Yes, I can see some partnership with an existing distro (something like « merge our drivers asap and you get preinstalled ») but IMO, the company behind Framework should focus on its strengths on the hardware design. I think they are on a hard market and it would make me sad to throw money into making another distribution.

Furthermore, I think that, atm, their target market may be 95% of power users who will flash a usb stick with their favorite OS even before receiving the computer.

I think that have a working/unofficial? relationship with some people from Fedora. I remember announcements some time ago that everything is working with it. Also given Fedora's upstream first approach that was a very good choice of them.

System76 has done good work on Linux support for (seemingly) similar hardware: https://tech-docs.system76.com/models/lemp10/README.html - some of that might be reusable.

pls no custom distro - i dont want something that breaks in specific ways

+1 for India. I'd really like to get one.

+1 for own Linux distro.

Apple always had the advantage of controlling both the hardware and the software.

Also, in the Linux space, I had amazing experience with Raspberry Pi OS. Not only that it works well out of the box, but being the OS most people use on that specific hardware makes searching for answers to any issues much easier.

Ideally though it would be as close as possible to an existing distro and only include patches needed for good Framework support.

> Apple always had the advantage of controlling both the hardware and the software.

And this is exactly why anyone who likes that approach can & will buy an Apple laptop. Framework is clearly going for the opposite of that market. Instead of being a (necessarily) worse clone of Apple, I think it makes sense for them to cater to the market they are clearly aimed at, which is not people who are happy with a walled-garden system.

How is having the option, besides Windows, to order the laptop preinstalled with a default, well tuned and well supported Linux distro a "walled garden"? Also, most patches in this distro would presumably end up merged upstream anyway.

I was referring to the prospect of their spending time working on their own distro, at the expense (considering the finitude of human lifespans etc) of supporting others. As with so many arguments, your point makes total sense until you consider that human effort is a finite resource.

> +1 for own Linux distro.

It's a bad idea to force users to use one distro. There are many users who run NixOS, and others prefer Ubuntu, or even Gentoo.

> Apple always had the advantage of controlling both the hardware and the software.

Controlling my own hardware is exactly what I look for when buying a laptop.

Yes, that could be easier to rather develop it from scratch.

Are there plans to release full schematics to help with board level repair?

We're able to make schematics and board views available to repair shops, but not to individual end users: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/availability-of-schem...

What is the definition of a "repair shop"?

I have, on my property, a standalone building in which I engage in a variety of activities to include fairly deep level repair of electronics. I have surface mount soldering skills and equipment (hot air rework, magnification, soldering tips), and documented surface mount work on my blog.

But I'm not a "random corner computer shop that can replace RAM."

Do I qualify, should I want schematics?

Don't worry, if the history of all the laptops which don't even have any schematics available officially is to continue, they will be leaked soon enough.

The link doesn't make clear why end users can't have access to this.

Disagree. Many people like me who don’t operate a formal shop have a Quick station and know what’s Amtech flux. I want access to schematics and boardviews. It is nonsense to withhold them.

Why not?

My first guess would be NDAs

I wouldn't expect so. All you get of third party parts on the schematic is the names of the pins, and that generally isn't kept secret. Sometimes the detailed functional descriptions of each pin are, but generally not anything you'd see from the schematic.

If you look at the Open Compute project, there's full schematics available for boards that have far more interesting parts than what would be on this.

Intel has become notoriously secretive with their documentation over the years, so I think that is very much the issue here. The 8086/8 were very open, but they started closing off little bits at a time after that. "Appendix H" in the P5 era was the first major sign of it. Bits and pieces have leaked out over time, but they still want to keep a lot of it secret.

For comparison, someone has made an entire 386 PC motherboard himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29273829

I suspect there's enough information out there publicly to do everything up to perhaps a PIII (Socket 370 era) or thereabouts, but it starts being much harder beyond that.

Guessing so that Chinese clones don't flood market with knockoffs?

They would do that anyway, publicly-available schematics or no.

A lot of existing (leaked) x86 mobo schematics are already available to anyone who cares to look. I don't think there's much "secret sauce" in a standard PC anyway, at least at the component interconnect level; it's almost like one of the worst-kept-secrets in the industry. There is a lot of commonality between all the designs. They might differ in the exact parts they use (e.g. VRM MOSFETs) but there's only so many ways to make something that works.

<img src="stoppedreadingthere.jpg">

Are all schematics, BoM, PCBs released with open licenses?

Is anything patented?

Would you welcome other companies making compatible components?

From the GitHub link:

> licensed under CC BY 4.0

> All of this is a starting point for a broader set of open source Mainboard documentation to enable creation of fully compatible third-party Mainboards in the future.

I don't see any full electronic schematics/BoM in the repo; they don't tell you how to replicate or modify the electronics, just how to fit the form factor.

It'd help to include a copy of the license, rather than a link to some other website.

Legally, it is a bit of an issue as the linked license could technically change.

Technically, it prevents github from recognizing CC-BY-4.0 as the repository license.

Good catch, we uploaded a LICENSE file.

First of all great work! But did you also consider the step after re-use? What happens to the components and the materials in recycling?

We hope and expect that many of the re-use use cases can have longer lifetimes than a laptop normally would (e.g. a pfsense box that happily chugs away in a closet for a decade), but past that point, it enters the same disposition stream that electronics can safely be recycled through by consumers. We're working on making that experience easier by having the QR code on each module point to a page that includes local certified recyclers in the future.

Ok great that's already way better then most ;) if you're interested in a LCA let me know

Can it be used as a single board computer like a latte panda or raspberry pi, once you supply thing like memory.

Yes, and they open-sourced a 3D-printable case just for that purpose :) https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Mainboard/tree/main/Mec...

"We designed the Mainboard from the start as a standalone module to make upgrades easy in the Framework Laptop and to also work great as a high-performance single board computer"

wow that is so nice.

Please please please keep the control of your company. The world desperately needs companies like yours.

Did you ever consider ECC Memory support? This would make SOHO workstations and storage appliances interesting to build with your board...

I don't think intel mobile CPUs support ecc

Any plans to sell this or other mainboards separately?

Yep, the Mainboard is available as of today: https://frame.work/products/mainboard?v=FRANFG000A

$400 for a powerful SBC with consumer-level support and drivers is a pretty great price.

Sure but outside a laptop, laptop processors make much less sense. $400 gets you a motherboard and a desktop class processor that is significantly faster.

That desktop motherboard and CPU likely requires more power, more cooling, and a bigger case.

I can see the "Framework motherboard as SBC" idea catch on for everything from set-top boxes (Steam Machines could make a comeback this way) to a poor man's blade server.

Laptop processors make sense when space is at a premium, even if it's not a mobile device. But if space isn't an issue, desktop parts are usually a better choice; you can usually power limit desktop cpus to laptop levels if power usage or heat are a constraint.

Being able to just buy something that works when you get it is a big plus IMO.

I’ve tried a few times in the last year and finding parts (that are actually available) for a sub- $500 small-form-factor system seems to be beyond my capabilities :)

You need to get on to aliexpress for stuff like that. Plenty of router type boxes in that price range. Even lenovo, Dell, etc. sell some of these labelled as IoT gateways.

"the average Core i5-1135G7 in our database is just as fast as the Core i5-10400H, Core i5-8300H, and Ryzen 7 3700U in multi-core benchmarks. The CPU acts even nicer when under single-core load, reaching similar heights as the Ryzen 7 5600X and Core i7-8700K."

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i5-1135G7-Processor...

It's better for SBC. Also laptop iGPU is better than desktop.

Does the mainboard require the keyboard and screen modules to function?

Or could one fully use it "standalone" providing they supply their own usb-c power, memory, storage + external keyboard+monitor?

edit - looks like it can. the 3d printable case is slick, wish it was sold in the store: https://frame.work/blog/mainboard-availability-and-open-sour...

It works fully standalone. Technically the only required items beyond the Mainboard itself are DRAM and a power source (USB-C or a Framework Laptop Battery).

Any word on when the batteries will be available? They've been "coming soon" for a while. I imagine there's a supply chain issue behind that -- not faulting you guys -- but it's kind of painful still not being able to replace the one part of my laptop that's guaranteed to wear out.

They are actually physically at our warehouse. The constraint has been the fulfillment logic to ensure they don't ship out from the warehouse by a method that allows air shipment. This is in progress, but in the meantime, we can manually take battery orders (an order containing only a battery) through our support form.

> The constraint has been the fulfillment logic to ensure they don't ship out from the warehouse by a method that allows air shipment.

Best of luck with that. I know with UPS even the Ground services include the possibility of going via air if the destination is even slightly disconnected from the US mainland (and I distinctly recall having to program ERP/WMS logic for blocking ORM-D shipments entirely to the Catalina Islands' zip code because UPS would accept the ORM-D-marked package, try to load it on a plane for that last hop, and then send us nastygrams about us being the ones somehow at fault for it); I don't think FedEx is any different in that regard.

It's definitely possible to ship batteries via air, but it has to be marked air cargo only and the fees are probably too steep to be worthwhile unless you're shipping a bunch at a time.

This inspired me to start tinkering on my framework laptop. Is there an integrated power switch onboard somewhere? I couldn't find one so I still needed to use the fingerprint reader connected to the input cover.

In the top left corner of the Mainboard there is a small button labelled "SW1".

When you select the different models of mainboard the order of the "Included", "Specs", and "Additional Information" options switch places. Just a minor UI thing.

Not exactly on this topic, but when can we hope you to start shipping to India?

I've got 2 questions unrelated to the mainboard.

Will a matte screen be supported?

Will a thinkpad style keyboard be available for the framework? Raynaud's syndrome makes trackpad sensing poor.

Are there hardware off switches for any cameras and mics?

Yep, they are actually part of the webcam module: https://frame.work/blog/1080p-webcam

https://frame.work/laptop says "a hardware privacy switch lets you physically cut off power to the image sensor" and "The dual MEMS microphones are connected to a hardware privacy switch". So the laptop definitely has them, but I'm not sure if they're part of the mainboard.

The link https://frame.work/marketplace/mainboards seems broken. It redirects me to https://frame.work/nl/en

Same here when accessing from the UK - marketplace links just redirect back to the main laptop purchasing page.

Are there plans to release documentation (not just pinouts but protocol?) for other elements on the board? One of the frustrations with working with ARM SoCs is having peripherals that you just can't talk to because the vendor hasn't released documentation for it.

Could you share which peripherals you see a need for additional documentation on? In most cases where a specific IC is controlling a peripheral or interface, we're at the mercy of the IC vendor or relevant standards body (VESA, PCI-SIG, USB-IF) to decide what is public.

Are you limited in how much documentation you can release because of contracts or legal reasons? For example, if Framework or another company wanted to build a fully open source mainboard for an Intel or AMD processor would that be possible?

Is it possible to buy just the mainboard with CPU and heatsink/fan unit, for integration into one's own embedded system? Assuming the obvious need to supply the correct DC power and other connectors/IO interface pieces.

Hi Nirav, This might be a tangent. Do you have any plans for eink display modules for the Framework laptop? I know it’s a niche and the eink panels are expensive, but it would be amazing for a portable machine.

I'd also be interested in this. But at the same time, I guess it's more likely that a third party will produce this, because Framework has other priorities.

For those who might wonder why eInk would be cool: Much better reading experience on the screen and insanely long battery life.

I’m a huge eink display fan, to the point of owning multiple tablet-shaped devices with larger EPDs. I agree that the reading experience for effectively static text and b/w images is great, but once you introduce any scrolling or transitions it quickly becomes worse than a standard LCD. UIs really need to be optimized for eink, just like they should be designed differently for smartphones, big desktop displays, and screen readers or other assistive tech.

W.r.t. power: I don’t think EPD magically runs on less power _while refreshing_. So again, if you are mostly displaying static text and figures —- like in an ebook reader —- it’s great. If you’re constantly repainting the UI, less so.

As much as we may like to think programming is all about staring at walls of text in editor buffers we’ve carefully tuned for readability, IME at least I spend a lot of time switching between an editor, live view of my running app, documentation, log and trace views, etc.

Neither a slow refresh (4-10 fps) with major ghosting or a glacially slow (<1 fps) one that’s clean is actually a very good trade off with most modern workflows. Including ones that are nominally about text, like coding.

When do you expect these computers will become coreboot compatible?

Congratulations on the project. Any plans for a 17 Inch screen?

When does it come available to the rest of EU?

Will BIOS support PCIe network card (with PCIe extender) connected to PCIe port? How many lines is it?

It's a laptop mainboard, there is no PCIe slot. Or do you mean nvme -> PCIe adaptor?

Another option is to put the nic inside a tb3 pcie enclosure and connect that. There are 4 thunderbolt ports.

From what I could find tb3 to PCIe is very expensive. NVME is basically a protocol on top of PCIe with m.2 connector.

Here's an example of m.2 to PCIe x4 adapter: https://www.delock.com/produkt/64131/merkmale.html

If adapter is possible we could use 4 port gig adapter for a nice pfsense/opnsense router or a VM server.

Understood, I actually have a m.2 to PCIe adaptor on hand now that I use with success with my honeycomb lx2. I'll test a nic for you with the framework m.2 port.

are there plans for AMD and Qualcomm based mainboards?

Why no modular GPU?

Are schematics available?

Also, thank you very much. I love my Framework laptop!

Incredible work.

any chance there might be a thinkpad x/t series style case made for these?

knocking off the mac is kinda cute, but mac laptop ergonomics and durability are terrible.