Framework Laptop 16 Input Module Firmware and Control Software

The B1 Display is a 4.2-inch, portrait-oriented, transmissive mono-color (black/white) screen with a resolution of 300x400px.

Key Characteristics:

• Framerate: Optimized for power at 1 FPS, but supports up to 32 FPS.
• Image Retention: The panel is susceptible to image retention. To mitigate this, the display starts with a screensaver. Sending a command to draw content will exit the screensaver, but it will not automatically reappear after a timeout; it only reappears on power-on or after waking from sleep.

Sleep mode turns off the LEDs and the LED controller. Transitions (turning on/off) are handled via slow fades.

Triggers

• Hardware/OS: The SLEEP# pin or USB Suspend. If USB suspends, the matrix turns off; if it resumes, the matrix wakes up.
• Software/Firmware: Sending a sleep/wake command via USB Serial or the internal idle timer (default 60 seconds).

Important Notes

• Any command sent to the device will wake it up.
• The sleep/wake command via USB cannot be received while the USB is suspended.
• The idle timer is reset whenever the device wakes up or receives a new command.

The flash memory is 1MB in size, divided into 256 4K blocks. The layout varies depending on whether the module is an LED Matrix or a QMK Keyboard. The final 4K block is reserved for the Serial Number.

LED Matrix Layout

QMK Keyboard Layout

The QT PY RP2040 reference firmware provides the following hardware interfaces:

• GPIO: General Purpose Input/Output pins.
• WS2812/Neopixel RGB LED: An addressable RGB LED that can be controlled via software commands.

To ensure the inputmodule-control application and other tools can access the input module's serial port on Linux, you must install the provided udev rules and reload the daemon.

sudo cp release/50-framework-inputmodule.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
sudo udevadm control --reload && sudo udevadm trigger

The inputmodule-control application can be built using cargo make. This requires pkg-config and libudev to be installed on your system.

# Install build helper
cargo install cargo-make --locked

# Build the application
cargo make --cwd inputmodule-control

# Build and run to check version
cargo make --cwd inputmodule-control run -- --version

To update the firmware, you must first put the module into bootloader mode. You can do this by flipping DIP switch #2 on the hardware or by running:

ledmatrixctl --bootloader

Once in bootloader mode, the module will appear as a USB mass storage device (like a thumb drive). Copy your .uf2 firmware file onto the device; it will flash and reset automatically.

You can control the color and brightness of the onboard WS2812/Neopixel RGB LED using the ledmatrix_control.py utility.

Available operations include:

• Setting brightness (0-255).
• Getting the current brightness.
• Setting the color using standard color names (e.g., yellow).
• Getting the current color in RGB:(R, G, B) format.

# Set brightness to 255
./ledmatrix_control.py --brightness 255

# Get current brightness
./ledmatrix_control.py --get-brightness

# Set color to yellow
./ledmatrix_control.py --set-color yellow

# Get current color
./ledmatrix_control.py --get-color

You can display system statistics on the B1 Display using a fork of the Turing Smart Screen software called lotus-smart-screen-python.

Setup:

1. Install Python and the required dependencies.
2. Run main.py from the repository.
3. The config.yaml is pre-configured to auto-detect the display on Windows or Linux.

Themes:

• B1Terminal: Pre-configured with various system statistics.
• B1Blank: Renders text from file1.txt onto the screen.

Customization:

• Change the background image in res/themes/{B1Blank,B1Terminal}/background.png.
• Customize displayed statistics in res/themes/{B1Blank,B1Terminal}/theme.yaml.

python main.py

Hardware versions since DVT2 (Sept 2023) include a two-switch DIP block.

DIP2: Bootloader Mode

To flash new firmware:

1. Unplug the module.
2. Flip DIP2 to ON.
3. Plug the module back in; it will appear as a RPI-RP2 flash drive.
4. Copy the .uf2 firmware file onto the drive. The device will flash and reappear as a drive.
5. Unplug the module, flip DIP2 back to OFF, and plug it back in to run the new firmware.

DIP1: Debug Mode

When DIP1 is enabled, the module enters Debug Mode. In this mode:

• The module will not turn off LEDs during sleep to save power.
• Instead, it will display the reason for sleeping on the matrix:
  • SLP#: Triggered by the SLEEP# pin.
  • USB: Triggered by USB Suspend.
  • CMD: Triggered by a software command.
• The module will not sleep based on the idle timer.

You can use the LED Matrix via a GUI in two ways:

1. Via CLI: Run ledmatrixctl --gui.
2. Standalone: Run the ledmatrixgui command directly.