Disassembly

Disassembly of the Mionix Wei is extremely simple due to the use of 18 Phillips head screws on the front. Do note that these are underneath or between keycaps, so you have to take many of these off to access those screws as shown above. Once done, the plastic case separates from the top piece, and you can then disconnect the keyboard's cable from the internal USB connector to take the top piece off entirely, which also has the PCB on it.


The case is ABS plastic and has a natural elevation at the top due to some free space that is used here for internal cable routing as well. The yellow piece with the Mionix writing on it is entirely removable, and you can add in a custom piece here if you are handy. The top piece has the aluminum plate such that the switches are all plate-mounted through and into the PCB that is black in color. The solder quality is fairly good with very short solder points that terminate in the same direction and minimal excess flux on the keyboard.


We see that the PCB has been codenamed "Bofink", the chaffinch in Swedish, although the really useful information here is that the PCB design was finalized on February 17 of this year. The keyboard is powered by an NXP LPC11U35F 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller with up to 128 KB of onboard flash memory, 12 KB of SRAM and 4 KB of EEPROM. In addition, there is a dedicated Macroblock MBI5042GP 16-channel LED driver for 16-bit PWM control (65, 536 individual R/G/B channels), which is way more than the usual 8-bit 16.8 M RGB colors supported here. As is the norm, all of these components are soldered on to a multi-layered PCB.

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.