Disassembly

Disassembly of the Drop + LOTR Elvish keyboard is mostly an academic exercise in seeing what's inside, as opposed to having feasible modding opportunities worth the lost warranty. It's also more time consuming than usual, since there you need to remove every single keycap to get the plastic top cover out. Doing so now reveals 13 Torx T5 screws on the front and then another four on the back underneath the feet/rubber pads. The ones on the back are slightly wider, so try to not mix them up as I inadvertently did here. Now you can use a thin flat object to carefully pry apart the interlocking plastic tabs holding the top cover in place. It reveals a thin ABS plastic cover that has the green color and the artwork on it.


Removing the top cover exposes two additional screws securing the steel plate/PCB piece in the case in addition to the four from the back previously removed. That's a total of 19 screws, and now you can easily lift off this piece without having to worry about any internal USB cables, given the Type-C port is right on the PCB itself. This also means there is a cutout for said port in the aluminium case which also has an insulating white plastic insert preventing any shorting issues. There is scope here to instead go with a foam sheet but I didn't find reverberations to be a major issue in this relatively low profile case.


The keyboard uses a generic green PCB with soldered switches and SMD LEDs as we saw before. Solder quality is fine, although some of the solder points are taller than I'd like to see. There's no wireless connectivity or extensive onboard programming/LED controls, so things are relatively simple with a single USB microcontroller, the HM32F1835, which I see has been used in some older Chinese keyboards too. It is likely a 32-bit ARM-based MCU but there is no useful information about who makes it, let alone the controller specifications itself. It should also handle the LED programming given the absence of hardware LED drivers here. All the components, including the switches, the 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.