Disassembly

Disassembly of the Fnatic miniSTREAK is on the simpler side of things owing to the aluminium frame, which usually means having screws on the front only. You have to remove specific keycaps as seen above for access to 15 countersunk Phillips head screws. Removing all of these provides enough slack to separate the two pieces slightly, which in turn creates enough room to access the internal USB cable. Dislodge the connector to completely separate the keyboard pieces.


The bottom case panel has a daughter PCB to host the USB Type-C connector, and the PCB itself is connected to the aluminium frame via all the soldered-through switches. There are other daughter PCBs here as well, which are used for the four extra buttons on the keyboard, in addition to the 87 Cherry MX switches for the standard TKL layout on the primary PCB. All PCBs are green, and all components are soldered on well—this PCB is very likely machine-assembled.


A sticker indicates the PCB was assembled in April of 2019, which makes this a fairly recent sample. We see a few tantalum capacitors strewn around the power delivery section, in addition to a larger polymer capacitor. Powering the keyboard is an NXP LPC11U37F-series 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 Cores-based USB microcontroller with up to 128 KB on-board flash memory, 12 KB RAM, and 4 KB EEPROM. There is also a dedicated 8 MB discrete flash memory module to store all the pre-programmed functions. All the components, including the switches, 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.