New Headphone Board Idea - Accessible UART, IR Blasting Port

MNT Pocket Reform
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i wanted to propose a new idea for the next hardware revision (though i may end up, in my spare time, just designing it myself)

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my idea is to add UART pins to the new headphone board here, right next to the standby switch. it would only need 3 which should barely fit, which with changing wiring internally dependent on the CPU model (for S1 or S2 UART), it would make access to UART pins way more accessible.

i’d also propose, if possible, making the female side (facing out) to be made of clear plastic with a little extra flat bit above the pins, for supporting potential Qwiic IR blaster additions (user supplied) around the internal metal bits and through the small “window”. maybe the housings could be resin printed? (though this would be easily alternatively solved with IR-transparent plastic side panels now that i think about it)

i think if it were carefully designed so the wires running from the MB to the headphone board were routed up over the other board components (taking advantage of the limited vertical space available) it would barely fit.

i’m mostly wondering if anyone thinks this is feasible and/or neat?

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Yep, I’ve solved SoC UART access and System Controller UART/flashing access from the outside via USB-C on the Mainboard 2.0. But me and other people also had various gameboy-like cartridge fantasies for the left side ports, so it would be really cool to see some community designs for this.

Including/with the later RCORE versions, there’s at least PCIe, USB2, 4 GPIOs (normally used for the third M.2/Wi-Fi slot), analog audio in/out, 2x SoC UARTs (on the “prongs”, one of them could also be switched to a different function) and System Controller I2C bus available. And another USB and some GPIOs from the modem M.2 port if not needed internally.

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