Disassembly

There are two screws with a Phillips head that need to be removed from the back before you can use a flat object to pry open the various plastic tabs around the the keyboard that keep the top and bottom panel pieces together. This will likely scratch the body, so I do not recommend doing so unless absolutely necessary. Once done, the top piece comes off and can be removed.


To remove the bottom panel pieces, three daughter PCBs need to be removed. The first two are for the two USB ports on the extreme ends that are held in place in ABS plastic housings built into the bottom panel piece, and you can dislodge them by slowly lifting the steel plate/main PCB upward. Once done, disconnect them by loosening the male pin connector on each and they come off. The third is for the micro-USB port, and here, you need to also remove the two precision Phillips head screws seen above. Once done, the entire assembly is free from the bottom panel piece.


We see here that the micro-USB daughter PCB is held in place via an internal USB cable, so dislodge it from the internal USB header to get this third daughter PCB out. The main PCB is printed Matias, and the third USB port is soldered in place with lots of capacitors around.


The main PCB, as with the daughter PCBs, is green in color. There is nothing to see here aside from all the soldering, which, to be frank, can really be improved upon. This looks like the job of a time-crunched assembly technician who did not care if the solder points met, or if there was some excess flux left. While it did not affect this particular sample and I would have no doubt been blissfully unaware had I not opened this up, I still urge Matias to get this improved lest it cause an actual issue at the assembly line or, worse, at the customer's house/office.


Noting that there were no controllers to be seen on the other side, it made sense that they must be on the front too, on a fourth daughter PCB. Indeed, that is where they were, and this daughter PCB was connected by a lot of pins, as seen above. Matias is using a Genesys Logic GL852G USB 2.0 hub controller, which supports up to four USB 2.0 ports and thus works just fine for this application. Powering the keyboard itself is a Sonix SN8F2288 8-bit microcontroller with 12 KB on-board flash memory and 512 B ROM, and it is fairly dated compared to most MCUs used by similar keyboards of newer designs now. But then again, there really is nothing the MCU has to take care of aside from the 104 + 4 key functionality, so if the dated MCU helps create cost savings which are passed on to the consumer, I have no issues with it at all. All PCBs are multi-layered, as 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.