Disassembly

Disassembly of the ROCCAT Vulcan 120 AIMO keyboard is a real pain with so many hidden screws on the back, including under the two feet, the long rubber pads, and the certification sticker. There are also two countersunk screws on the front at the top left, which makes it a total of 16 screws. A precision Phillips head screwdriver comes in handy when removing them, which helps separate the two main pieces of the keyboard by enough to see the internal USB cable that needs to be dislodged to fully separate them.


As suspected, the bottom case panel is made out of ABS plastic and houses the two feet as well as the notch for the wrist rest. The blue PCB has the switches soldered through the aluminium plate to effectively make this a single piece. Solder quality is quite good, and we see quite a lot of capacitors strewn across the length of the PCB here, as well as how much larger the aluminium plate is compared to the PCB with empty room for no real reason but design.


Powering the keyboard is an NXP LPC11U35F ARM Cortex-M0 32-bit USB microcontroller with up to 128 KB of onboard flash memory, 12 KB of SRAM, and 4 KB EEPROM. There is also a dedicated Macronics 512 KB discrete flash memory module to store all the pre-programmed functions. All components, including the switches, 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.