Disassembly

I knew going in that some damage was going to be done to the plastic case, so only take this keyboard apart if you have no other recourse. The two-piece plastic case construction requires one to carefully pry apart the interlocking tabs, and even then you will see plastic guides on either side of the tabs that require even more leverage to be applied to separate. Start at the bottom and work your way around the sides, after which it will get easier on the fourth side. We see that the top panel piece is quite thin and houses diffusers for the indicator LEDs at the front of the PCB.


To remove the bottom panel, you need to access just four screws that are placed underneath and between specific keycaps as seen above. One of the screws is under a QC sticker, so there will be a tell-tale sign of disassembly. Once done, the plate/PCB section can be lifted upwards and away to access the internal cable going from the battery to the PCB. Disconnect it, and that's it!


There's not much to see on the bottom case panel, but I will draw your attention to the thick slider that is well-built and should be oriented with the toggle slider on the PCB before re-assembly. We also see the battery inside insulation and glued to the case here, and Akko uses an 1800 mAh battery, which is plenty enough for a keyboard without any backlighting. The switches on the keyboard go through a steel plate, also colored pink, and are soldered onto the matte black PCB.


Solder quality is very good for all the components, including the switches and the Type-C connector, in addition to the physical slider switch used to turn on or off the Bluetooth transceiver. Although we do see some excess flux, which is a bit ugly, it is not a big deal at all. Powering the keyboard is a Vision VS11K17A 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 USB microcontroller for wired mode, and wireless operation is taken care of by a Cypress CYW20730 Bluetooth 5.1 transceiver. You read that right, the Akko keyboard actually supports Bluetooth 5.1 rather than the Bluetooth 3.0 mentioned in the specifications. I don't know if this is an actual change implemented in the firmware yet since the company and Epomaker both still claim Bluetooth 3.0, and I do not have a protocol sniffer, such as Wireshark, to verify. All the components, including the switches, LEDs, and capacitors, are soldered to a multi-layered PCB.

Before we move on, be advised that disassembly may void the warranty and that TechPowerUp is not liable for any damages incurred if you decide to go ahead and do so anyway.