Disassembly

Not only do we have hot-swappable optical switches here, but Epomaker packed in some spare switches, too. So I wanted to start this section off with taking apart the Epomaker Chocolate Silver switch, which by itself does not look that different from most others. Of course there are the top, stem, spring, and housing sections, with the latter hosting the piece for the actuation mechanism. A gold spring greets us, and as with the stabilizers from before, the switches are individually lubed, too. Epomaker is keeping the lube type a secret for now, but the application is well done—enough is applied to where the spring is also lightly lubed from the action. These are shaping up to be some really nice factory switches!


Given the hybrid design with the plastic base and aluminium plate/top, disassembly is quite simple. 12 Phillips head screws hold the Epomaker AK84S together, and these can be accessed by removing certain keycaps as seen above. A precision screwdriver comes in handy here, and with all screws removed, just lift off the top to separate the two main pieces enough to dislodge the internal cable connecting the two. We see the use of a relatively massive 4000 mAh battery here, which is more than twice that of the Akko 3084 and bodes well for battery life. A closer look at the bottom plastic panel reveals Jikedingzhi as another partner, as well as the housing for the power switch we saw before.


Given the aluminium top is also the plate here, the PCB is part of the top piece and not the bottom. You can obviously remove every single switch to further separate the plate from the PCB, but there is not much to gain from doing so. If you find a replacement plate, or make one yourself, this would be the next logical step, of course. The PCB is one of the cleanest and sparsely populated ones I have ever seen on a keyboard, which is primarily for this optical version, of course. It is a satin black in finish, with excellent solder quality on the components that do get the solder treatment. We also have the switch that is associated with the housing to toggle Bluetooth on/off, and powering the wired mode on the keyboard is a Weltrend WT59F164 32-bit USB microcontroller placed at a weird 45° angle relative to the horizontal dimension of the PCB. It is based on the RISC microarchitecture with up to 64 KB flash and 8 KB RAM. There are also three separate Shenzhen Sunmoon SM16159 LED drivers to help run all the RGB LEDs on the keyboard. Wireless connectivity is powered by a Cypress CYW20730 Bluetooth 5.1 processor and integrated 2.4 GHz transceiver. All the components, including the sockets, 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.