Disassembly

Disassembly of the Rosewill NEON K85 RGB is extremely simple provided you know where the screws are on the front. In order to access them, you have to remove some specific keycaps and then use a precision Phillips head driver to remove the fifteen screws keeping the keyboard together. Once done, you can simply lift the aluminum frame off to separate that piece from the ABS plastic bottom panel.


The cable terminates in an internal USB connector, so you will need to dislodge the cable to fully separate the two pieces. We also see here that Rosewill has a cable channel built into the bottom plastic panel. The PCB itself is attached to the top piece, and the switches are hence plate-mounted through the aluminum frame and into the red PCB underneath.


The PCB has a marking that identifies it as a revision A1 keyboard, and it is codenamed "RK-890", which is in-line with the previous keyboard names from Rosewill, so perhaps this was the proposed name before Rosewill settled on NEON K85 RGB. Moving on, solder quality is mediocre at best here since excess solder flux abounds and there are small solder bits on the PCB, which definitely makes this something that can be improved. The keyboard is powered by a Nuvoton NUC121SC2AE 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller with up to 32 KB onboard flash memory and 8 KB SRAM. There are no dedicated LED drivers, so this does double duty as well. All the components and switches are soldered on to a multi-layered PCB.

Before we move on, 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.