Disassembly

As is usually the case with metal-frame keyboards these days, disassembly of the Tesoro Gram Spectrum TKL is fairly simple. You will have to remove some of the keycaps to access countersunk screws as seen above, and removing all 13 screws helps separate the two primary pieces of the keyboard with no internal cable to worry about. The bottom piece is made out of ABS plastic and has a cutout for the micro-USB port to fit into, as well as two other cutouts to accommodate the keyboard feet. There is also a sheet of isolating material to prevent electrical shorting of the PCB.


The PCB is on the same piece as the thick steel plate that got the white powder-coating treatment for durability, and the switches are thus soldered through the plate and on to the PCB. We get a black PCB with very good soldering work throughout, including on the USB port and various LEDs. Powering the keyboard is an NXP LPC11U24F 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller with up to 32 KB of onboard flash memory, 10 KB of SRAM, and 4 KB EEPROM. Tesoro has added a 512 KB dedicated flash memory module as well to store the pre-programmed functionality beyond that of a standard USB keyboard, and here are also two dedicated Sonix SLED1734 LED drivers which can drive up to 256 separate LED lights or 75 RGB LED lights each. Given this is a TKL keyboard sporting 87 RGB LEDs, a minimum of two of these were needed, and two is what we have here. All the 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.