Disassembly

Given the hot-swappable switches here, I wanted to begin this section with a look inside the Epomaker Sea Salt switches that came on this sample. This is a linear switch with a pre-lubed stem and spring, and well lubed to where I don't expect to gain much from taking these apart for cleaning and re-lubing. It is also a silent switch in having a dampened bottom housing where the stem hits when bottoming out, but otherwise the switch design is quite similar to other such Cherry MX-style switches in that stem pushes the copper contacts in the bottom housing together to initiate switch actuation that is read by the microcontroller on the keyboard.


Disassembly of the keyboard is not hard and yet the two-piece ABS plastic construction means you need to use a thin, flat object to pry apart interlocking plastic tabs keeping the top and bottom panel together. As such, I do not recommend taking apart the keyboard unless you have a very good reason since it is likely you will leave marks on the plastic or even potentially break off the tabs. Once it's loosened enough, you will notice there are two ribbon cables going from daughter PCBs secured in the top panel to the primary PCB. You will need to carefully dislodge these to fully get the ABS top panel out. It's also at this point that we see Epomaker's claims of a gasket mount need to be taken with a grain of salt. Unlike traditional such implementations that have rubber/foam gaskets all the way around protruding sections of the plate, the RT100 just goes with foam inserts in the bottom panel that the plate pushes down into. It's still effective but the marketing can lead people to expect a different solution.


There is another internal cable going from the PCB to the bottom panel as seen here, remove this to fully separate the main pieces. Epomaker has a thick foam sheet placed between the PCB and the plastic casing to further dampen keystrokes and minimize reverberations in use. Underneath this we find the relatively massive 5000 mAh pouch-style battery that should provide good battery life in either of the two wireless operating modes.


At this point you can choose to remove all keycaps and switches to further separate the plate from the primary PCB itself, and this would allow you to also potentially replace and re-lube the stabilizers too. The PCB itself is black in color with much better solder quality compared to the daughter PCBs from earlier that might have been hand-assembled. Epomaker is using good quality Kailh 5-pin hot-swap switch sockets here which I can vouch for not only in terms of compatibility with pretty much all hot-swap 3- or 5-pin switches but also in reliability over longer periods of use should you be the type to keep experimenting with different switches. LEDs are associated with each switch in a south-facing configuration as previously discussed. There are two separate YiChip YC3x-series chips which are dual 32-bit RISC architecture USB microcontrollers as well as Bluetooth 5.0 transceivers. There are a few other harder-to-identify drivers here that might well be for LED control in addition to hosting a 2.4 GHz SoC. The side view confirms the use of a thicker foam sheet present between the plate and the PCB, in addition to the thinner switch sheet we saw on the previous page, for added sound dampening. All the components, including the switch sockets, SMD 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.