Disassembly

After having removed the keycaps from the board, you will see 5 small countersuck screws with a Phillips head. These are all that keep the PCB mounted in the case. Remove them, and you can take a look at the components in more detail. The serial number of your specific unit should be mentioned here if you need it for anything later on.


The PCB is red, and solder quality is decent but not exceptional with no visible residual flux but multiple, minimal height solder peaks which are spaced far away from each other owing to the keyboard layout to be an issue. Powering the CORE's core is an NXP HTC138 memory decoder and demultiplexer, what looks like either an NXP or a High Country Tek microcontroller but is very hard to make out due to the intentional markings by Vortex, and a Macroblock MBIA043GP LED driver. This LED driver is on my engineering sample which also has RGB backlighting, and is the same one Cooler Master has used on their recent MasterKeys Pro keyboards so I do not know if the base non-backlit version will have the same components. There is not much that needs to be done with the base version to be fair, and a decent MCU with some integrated memory for the programming will suffice.


The non-backlit version differs from this one in that not all keys are backlit, but there are 3 LEDs on it for functionality. The first is by the side of the Caps lock key which will turn white when Caps lock is on, and turn off when not. The second and third are under the left and right space bar keys which we will take a look at soon. From what I heard out of owners of the non backlit CORE, all three are RGB LEDs although Vortex never intended their use for anything other than some functions.

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.