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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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."

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