Building an Open Source Ecosystem for the Framework 16
Main Track,
The Framework 16 laptop has the most flexible input module system of any laptop on the market. The unique design allows endless customization that is powered by open source firmware.
The Hardware Design
Overview of the hardware and constraints of building firmware for an input system on a laptop.
The upcoming Framework 16 gaming laptop has a hot-pluggable and configurable input deck. A keyboard, numpad, touchpad or even an LED matrix can be installed in many different configurations.Firmware Development
Overview of our Keyboard firmware including our QMK port, and Rust firmware development for our LED display module and other input modules.
All top row input devices are regular USB 2.0 devices with their own microcontrollers. This makes them a very easy target to get started with hacking on software to interact with them or to hack on their firmware. The GPL/MIT licensed QMK/Rust based firmware for the modules allows easy user customization. The Raspberry RP2040 MCU which all our modules use has a built-in ROM bootloader that always allows reflashing the firmware - so there's no need to be afraid of bricking the firmware. It can always be recovered.
With these modules we enable anyone complete freedom to customize their laptop. To customize
keyboard layout, where they place it and what firmware they run. Since the modules are so simple, writing your own firmware is as easy as any Arduino project.
- Developer Program - Call to action
An overview of how much closed firmware is running on a modern laptop, and opportunities to open more firmware in Framework products.
We want to encourage the community to modify the firmware, write their own and even create their own modules.