Disassembly

Disassembly is very simple here, with simply some Phillips head screws holding the bottom plastic panel and the rest of the keyboard together from the front. These are mostly around the periphery of the keyboards, but there are also some in the middle, and thus, some keycaps need to be removed to gain access to them, as seen above. A couple are also hidden underneath the rubber pads, which you need to peel off to expose, however.


A green PCB greets us when we flip over the steel frame/PCB section, which was apparently finalized on June 3, 2016 if the label is anything to go by. Solder quality can definitely be improved, with an inconsistent presence of solder peaks all around and in sets of two that are close to each other.


Tantalum caps galore around the I/O and control region on the keyboard. Both USB ports are soldered well, and powering the Alloy FPS is an NXP LPC11U1x series microcontroller, a 32-bit ARM processor with up to 32 kB onboard flash memory and 6 kB SRAM. This is a full-speed USB 2.0 MCU, which is all the Alloy FPS needs anyway. Alongside it is a Macronix 3 Mb low voltage flash memory module to possibly store the lighting settings and more. The PCB is multi-layered, which is the norm these days.

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.