Disassembly

There are three Phillips head screws at the top of the back that need to be removed before prying open and separating the two plastic panel pieces that make up the case of the keyboard. At this point, there are still a couple of things keeping the two together, so tread carefully lest you break something.


The first thing to do is to loosen and remove the ribbon cable from the PCB attached to the bottom panel piece. There is also a wire, an electrical connection, from the PCB that makes contact with the top piece housing the switches themselves. The wire is held in place with a piece of copper tape, so be careful here as well. Once done, we can take a better look at the two pieces separately.


The top piece has the switches as mentioned above, but also the steel plate that helps provide structural rigidity and a backplane for the membrane part of the switches to rest upon and make contact with. There are also light diffusers where the LEDs on the keyboard are going to light up to help provide uniform lighting when the lights are on for visual indication.


The PCB is fairly small, and to be fair, there's not much it has to do here anyway. There are the three LEDs for Num Lock, Caps Lock and Scroll Lock, four solid capacitors, and helping operate the USB hub is a Genesys Logic GL850G USB 2.0 hub controller. The keyboard MCU must be on the other side of the PCB, but there is not enough slack on the cable wires to unscrew and turn it over. Given this basic functionality of the keyboard, and it performing just fine, I am content not knowing exactly what it is.

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.