Disassembly

Most of the screws are visible from the underside of each half, but there is also one underneath each label. These have a standard Phillips head so a Ph#1 driver will suffice. Once done, the top and bottom plastic panels come apart. With the Shine, each half has a dedicated PCB for the LEDs in the top panel and this is connected to the primary PCB (per half) via an internal connector. However, both LED sets are controlled together using a single Lattice Semiconductor iCE5LP1K field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based controller on the left half. There is onboard storage also to remember the lighting profiles, and the LED setup is open source so you can program just about any lighting effect you want using the 30 addressable RGB LEDs available.


The rest of the left hand PCB is fairly straightforward, with a TRRS input from the right half and the LED PCB connector. Both halves are marked to distinguish each other and prevent any manufacturing issues. Solder quality is very good, if not excellent.


The right hand PCB is more complicated in that it handles all the keyboard processing. In fact, it is capable of operating by itself if you do not connect the left half to it. Powering this in an Atmel Corporation ATmega32U4 microcontroller which is an 8-bit AVR (a modified Harvard architecture) RISC (reduced instruction set computing) design strategy device with 32 KB of self-programming flash program memory, 2.5 KB SRAM, 1 KB EEPROM and USB 2.0 full-speed/low speed operation. Needless to say, USB 2.0 is all you need to use the keyboard although USB 3.0 is recommended for the LEDs in the Shine. The ErgoDox EZ is also a fully customizable keyboard with multiple layers of programming, and the Atmel MCU is part of a PJRC Teensy 2.0 USB dev board which can accept, load and activate firmware files. In order to flash a new configuration, this needs a manual button on the tool to be pressed and it is on the other side of the PCB (the last picture above barely shows it). There is a small hole on the top of the right half thus which you use with a pin for this purpose, and based on my experiences I would really like to see this more easily accessible in future iterations/re-designs.

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 decide to go ahead and do so anyway.