Disassembly

Given we have hot-swappable switches and Royal Kludge included spares, what better way to begin the disassembly page than by taking one of the switches apart? The RK Brown is a tactile switch adopting the Cherry MX cross-point stem design with a clear top, brown stem, metal spring, and base housing that also houses the metal leaf contact. As the stem travels down, it touches one side of the metal leaf, which is in turn pushed towards the other side. This metal contact then triggers the actuation of the keystroke on the PCB, and off it goes to your computer to be reflected as an action. No lubing to see anywhere, these are budget switches through and through. The tactile feedback comes from an extra bump in the stem which, as it slides down, meets the contact leaf separately from the actuation point and causes the tactile bump. It is not very pronounced because of the relatively smaller bump akin to the Cherry MX Brown, though.


As far as plastic case keyboards go, disassembly of the RK84 is among the easiest since I was able to remove the top plastic panel with my hands alone as there are no interlocking plastic tabs, with the top panel simply placed snugly on top. There isn't any flex if that was a concern. Once done, you need to remove some keycaps to access the six Phillips head screws that hold the rest of the keyboard together.


A precision Phillips screwdriver comes in handy here, following which you can lift the plate/PCB piece up far enough to access the two internal cables going from the bottom case panel to the PCB itself. Dislodge both and you can finally separate them completely. The first cable goes from an internal 3750 mAh Li-ion battery glued into the case to the PCB to provide power in either wireless modes. It is sufficiently large for the form factor and a typical use case, although RGB lighting will chew up battery life no matter what. The other cable come from a daughter PCB hosting the USB hub itself, passing on one of the signals to aid with wired mode. There's not much else to see here but for the confirmation that ABS plastic is used for the case, and it's mostly empty, which might result in some reverberations when typing. Users may want to fill in the space with a carefully cut piece of foam, with cutouts for the toggle switches and cables to go through, but I suspect most won't go that far.


The PCB is blue, and solder quality is very good. We also see the use of Kailh 5-pin hot-swap sockets, which is nice since they are more expensive than the no-name 3-pin sockets that could have been used. Powering the wired connectivity of the RK84 is a BYK961 USB microcontroller. There isn't any useful information about this online except from another vendor of another keyboard mentioning it supports some RGB lighting effects. A similar version is used in a Redragon keyboard we recently saw. Wireless connectivity comes in the form of a Beken BK3632 integrated 2.4 GHz wireless SoC with support for Bluetooth 5.0. As is the norm, all the components are soldered onto a multi-layer 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.