Disassembly

I love that there are no plastic tabs or hidden screws anywhere here as it makes my job a lot easier. Eleven hex 2.0 mm screws secure the top panel to the rest. Once removed, the top panel comes right off, and we can see it is a fairly thick piece of aluminum that helps add structural rigidity to the keyboard while looking great. There are some foam pieces on the underside to prevent any direct metal-metal contact, or metal-PCB contact, and once removed, we get our first look at the PCB from the front.


There are ten more screws at the front that need to be removed; these have a Phillips head instead. Also remove the internal USB connector and the PCB/plate part comes loose from the bottom plastic panel, which in turn houses the pass-through port completely. There is a green PCB here, which was supposedly finalized on June 14, 2016, based on the printing above. Solder quality is fairly good, with no solder peaks and only some cut points in sets of two positioned throughout where the LEDs are connected.


The Das Keyboard Prime 13 is a fairly standard keyboard in terms of functionality and has a single color backlighting option. As such, the Holtek HT68FB560 MCU used here works fine. It is an 8-bit USB 2.0 RISC architecture-based controller with up to 16 Kb of onboard flash memory and 768 Kb SRAM. In addition, we see the use of a Shenzhen First-Rank T24C02A EEPROM module that has 256 Kb of storage. There are multiple tantalum capacitors on the PCB, which in turn has multiple layers as well.

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.