Disassembly

Disassembly of the Aukey KM-G8 is extremely simple provided you know where the screws that hold the ABS plastic bottom panel and the rest of the keyboard together are located. As seen above, every single screw is between some switches, so you have to remove specific keycaps to access them. Once done, a precision Phillips head driver will help remove the ten screws here, which then allows for the separation of the keyboard frame.


Flipping over the top piece, we see the keyboard cable attached to an internal USB header, which also has some glue on it. On my sample, the glue was offset enough to be able to remove the cable without much fuss, so perhaps that glue placement was not done properly here or used to just hold the header in place before it was soldered. Regardless, it should either have been applied correctly or scraped off if no longer in use. The bottom panel is indeed made of ABS plastic as the marking on it states.


The switches are plate mounted through the metal plate and into the PCB, so you can't take the switches out unless you are willing to de- and then re-solder. As it is, we see the PCB is black in color with a light gloss finish, but more distracting are the multiple hot glue lines all over. This is shoddy work here and needs to be improved, but at the same time, I concede that it has no practical effect on my sample, and I only noticed or suspected it post disassembly in the first place. The soldering itself is decent with solder peaks pushed downwards and away from each other.


Aukey has decided to apply an opaque mask on the microcontroller here to prevent identification, which I still don't understand the reasoning behind in this day and age where OEMs talk freely. Regardless, this being a standard keyboard with no software driver support or backlighting, there is not much the MCU has to do. As long as it has some onboard memory for the programmed functions, including the keyboard-specific media functions, it'll do the job well enough. The keyboard uses a multi-layered PCB, as is the norm lately.

Before we take a look at the driver, be advised that disassembly will void the warranty and that TechPowerUp is not liable for any damages incurred if you decided to go ahead and do so anyway.