Disassembly

Given the hot-swappable switch feature on the James Donkey RS2, I wanted to begin this section with a look inside the Gateron Brown switches that came on this sample. The switch is held together with plastic clips on the top and bottom housing. Use a thin flat screwdriver to pry one side off before the other, but not by too much. The stem comes lightly pre-lubed at the factory and has a more pronounced notch relative to the Cherry MX Brown, which in turn accounts for a more pronounced tactile bump. The spring itself is similar in function, making for a light-medium force switch. Gold-plated crosspoint contacts, which make contact with the stem for the tactile feedback and switch actuation, complete the picture.


Disassembly of the keyboard itself is simpler than I thought, although it still goes with the usual interlocking plastic tab method to secure the two piece case together. Use a thin, flat object to carefully pry them apart beginning from the bottom and going around the sides, but note that you may still break tabs and/or scratch the keyboard when doing so. Also be careful now since the three pieces (top case panel, plate/PCB, bottom case panel) are still connected via internal cables. The bottom case panel has a single cable that goes from a daughter PCB, as seen above, and this in turn has the Type-C port, the wireless on/off switch, and the power cable from the 3000 mAh battery itself—not the biggest one for this size but should be adequate enough. What is not adequate though are those terrible "gaskets" which seem to be just extremely soft/low-density foam that the company refers to as "cotton". See, I didn't mention this much until now but James Donkey markets the RS2 as a gasket mount keyboard which in turn necessitates decoupling of the plate/PCB from the chassis via dampening gaskets on the top and bottom. These are usually make of high quality silicone, so seeing these and actually noting how un-gasket-like the RS2 is just shouts poor execution and potentially misleading some people into higher expectations unfortunately. These are far too soft to absorb typing pressure gracefully, and instead just collapses inward and at an uneven pace too.


The top case panel also has a daughter PCB and this one caters exclusive to the rotary encoder the volume wheel is attached to. Remove it to get a closer look at the black primary PCB with the cutout on the top right corner (as seen from the front) and note the Gateron hot-swap switch sockets employed here. No wonder then that James Donkey also provides only two Gateron switch options with this keyboard. Solder quality is quite good and the PCB is likely machine assembled too. Powering the keyboard is an unidentified HFD501KJD USB microcontroller as well as an HS6620 ARM-Cortex SoC/Bluetooth/2.4 GHz transceiver that has been used on smart watches before. Not the most powerful hardware here thus, and perhaps once again a sign of a budget to meet. You could disassemble further and separate the plate from the PCB by removing some extra screws and all the switches, but it's only worth it if you were going to re-lube the switches and lube/replace the stabilizers. 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.