Disassembly

Disassembly of two-piece plastic case keyboards usually tends to be cumbersome, but this was a lot more user-friendly thanks to UHK even making a handy disassembly guide available online. A few Phillips head screws on the back are easily accessible, with two per half to be exact. We begin with the right half, and once both screws are removed, take a thin, flat object to pry apart interlocking tabs in the plastic case pieces, which was quite easy and with minimal risk of breaking off the tabs, at least with my sample. Indeed, UHK says that the tabs were designed to be unbreakable, which follows up with their aim to make this easy for repair. This allows for the top panel piece to be removed, and then there are six more screws (five underneath keycaps) that help separate the PCB from the bottom case piece.

The PCB is black in color, and the switches appear to be mostly hand soldered through the steel plate; however, UHK let me know that the switches use an automated selective reflow soldering process instead. The mini USB port is alongside one of the 4P4C connectors, and a sticker on the PCB tells us this particular unit was put together in the latter half of 2019. Powering the UHK, or at least the right half of it, is an NXP MK22FN512VLH12 Kinesis K22 USB microcontroller using a 120 MHz Cortex-M4F Performance core, 512 KB of onboard flash memory, and 128 KB SRAM. All components, including the switches, LEDs, and capacitors, are soldered to a multi-layered PCB.


The left half of the keyboard is similarly taken apart, and the whole thing takes less than five minutes, too. As expected, there is no USB controller here, and instead, I chose to focus on other things in the images above which help provide a better look at the ABS plastic case, the LED display on a daughter board connected via a ribbon cable, and one of the two clicky switches on the entire keyboard with mouse-click-like feedback. There are a lot of gold traces on the PCB, and even the company name and logo are printed in a matching color on the PCB.

This is one of the extremely rare cases where disassembly does not void the warranty. Instead, UHK proudly uses ease of modding and repair as a marketing feature, and even has a dedicated section on their website to make this easier for the end user. It goes without saying that this has my complete support accordingly.