A laptop’s keyboard may be the main interface point with the user, but the hinge mechanism of a laptop computer is an often overlooked critical mechanism that can make or break the entire ownership experience. The challenge is even more profound for tablet/laptop convertibles like this Acer Aspire Switch 10 (SW5-012) since it had to detach as well. Digging into this mechanism as part of my teardown unveiled a very intricate but also extremely robust piece of mechanical engineering.

The first challenge is, of course, figuring out where to start opening it up. I pried on the back plate hoping it would pop loose. It did, sort of, in a irreversible and destructive way.

But with it open, I could tell there’s an angled metal spine to this hinge and there are probably fasteners hiding under the rubbery material that cushions the main display unit when it is attached to this base.

The two rubbery cushions were held with double sided tape. Once peeled off, each exposed two screws that helped hold the top plate in place. They’re not the only fastening mechanism, though, there were many other places where the top plate held on for its life and it did not come loose willingly. I ended up breaking it into several pieces.

Top plate removal exposed many more fasteners, several of which held the backplate.

And the remaining fasteners held the metal spine to the bottom section. This is easily the highest density of screws in this machine holding everything together, reinforcing the critical nature of this component.

I finally freed the nine-conductor pogo connector that was one of my objectives for taking this retired computer apart. There are also a few magnets that held the display module in place as a simple and elegant “Acer Smart Hinge”. They will also be salvaged for potential future fun.

And now with the hinge thoroughly taken apart, I retrieved the main module which had been baking in the sun in preparation for fighting annoying glue.

There were two high density circuit boards in the base of an Acer Aspire Switch 10 (SW5-012) tablet/laptop convertible. One handled general connectivity to the main display unit of the computer, and another purely focused on touchpad input. The third, while technically a circuit board as well, is less dense and is the array of switches that implement the keyboard of this machine.

Typing on this keyboard has been a good experience, at least as far as membrane keyboards go. Key travel felt good, and the scissor mechanism sturdily held actions crisp. Even though this is a thin and light (very much so for its day, and still respectably so today) convertible, it never felt flimsy. As I dig inside, I could see what gave it such a solid feel: metal structural plates and lots of mounting points.

The sheer number of mounting points make it rigid, but they are not held with removable fasteners. They are held with plastic rivets probably for cost of manufacturing, but this also meant there’s no way to nondestructively replace the keyboard module. I start by peeling the keyboard surround from the metal chassis plate. Pop, pop, pop, went those rivets as I pulled.

Once the keyboard surround was removed, I could see a magnet that I can harvest (below where the right arrow key used to be) and the remainder will become plastic landfill. The keyboard itself is held to the metal plate by even more plastic rivets, and once I pop them off to remove the keyboard the metal plate should be clean enough for general scrap metal.

Here is a closeup of the control key in the lower left corner, and the numerous gray plastic rivets holding the keyboard module in place.

I popped off the control keycap to take a closer look at the scissor mechanism on this keyboard. I imagine there are only a few major suppliers/styles for this mechanism, unless there’s a product differentiation I’m ignorant about motivating keyboard makers to custom design their own. In any case, my interest was seeing if I can cannibalize the scissor mechanism to repair a missing key on the HP Mini (110-1134CL) netbook from NUCC.

Sadly while the two scissors mechanisms are very similar to each other, they are not identical. Perhaps someone skilled with modifying watchmaker–level mechanisms can hack the pieces to fit, but that is beyond my skill level today. I’ll leave this keyboard alone for now and switch focus to this computer’s robust hinge mechanism.

When I looked at the reinforcement rib network on the bottom plate I just pulled off, I saw it was not symmetric. The reason became clear when I looked at the internal circuitry of this keyboard base, those asymmetric gaps in reinforcement ribs were to make room for a circuit board and the data cables connecting it to the keyboard array.

Two large connectors dominate the center of this board, one with four conductors and another with five. These nine conductors directly connect to the nine pogo pins connecting to the main unit of this computer. If there were only four conductors I would have been tempted to see if it was direct USB, but there are nine conductors and I don’t have a good idea what might be going on.

I thought the USB hypothesis had merit when I found one of the ICs on board is a USB hub controller. It would have been a valid way to implement this keyboard base: turn the keyboard, the touchpad, and the USB port into individual USB devices connected to a common hub. But USB isn’t a protocol I’ve worked with, it works at far higher speed than any diagnostics tools I have on hand, and I’m not particularly motivated to get this running because if I did, what would I get? A keyboard and a mouse pointer device. I already have enough of those.

So I continued to merrily tear things apart looking for interesting sights as I went. The other circuit board in the base is entirely dedicated to the touchpad. The controller IC on this board is from Synaptics, a very popular supplier for touch hardware. The metal frame came apart in two separate pieces.

It works as a hinge to act against a physical button handling taps on this touchpad. I’m amused that there’s only a single button, they must correlate this button with finger positions in order to infer left or right click.

Flipping it over, I see the cosmetically perfect top surface of the touchpad.

As is typical of touchpads, that top surface is merely a façade covering a network of electrical wires that is used by the Synaptics IC to sense finger position. This is analog voodoo I don’t understand in the least, and neither do most other people, which is why companies like Acer pay Synaptics to figure out. The façade is a sticker that I could peel off to expose the circuit pattern below.

Yep, it’s an array of repeated patterns. Yep, the individual elements will help determine position of our fingers. Beyond those generalities, I have no clue. I’ve taken apart many laptop touchpad like this, and no two has used the same pattern on their circuit boards. Voodoo, I say! Thankfully, with its array of on/off switches, a keyboard is more straightforward than the analog magic of a touchpad.

The Acer Aspire Switch 10 (SW5-012) was a Windows 8 convertible tablet/laptop that easily separated into two parts. For my teardown purposes, this meant I could work on the keyboard base while the main display module is sitting in the sun to soften the glue holding it together.

When this computer is in laptop mode, the main module communicates with its keyboard base through these robust-looking pogo connectors. I’m not sure I can find a good way to reuse them, but I’m definitely trying to salvage them intact so I’d have the option in the future. It was pretty trivial to pull the top part, and extracting its counterpart from this base is my current objective.

I flipped the base over and saw several straightforward Philips screws. Laptop fasteners are usually hidden, or require an annoying esoteric tool, so this was a delightful surprise. I pulled out a screwdriver, removed (almost) all of them and pulled off the base plate.

A loud crack announced the fact that there were actually two more screws hidden under a gray strip of plastic, and pulling the base apart destroyed plastic around these hidden screws. I’m glad I have no intention of putting this thing back together into working order.

Flipping the bottom plate over, we can see the internal structure. It has a surprising complex of reinforcement ribs. Interestingly, the network is not symmetric. Not top-bottom, and not left-right, yet it speaks to a clear purpose that was not obvious from just looking at this piece.

In any case, these reinforcement ribs reminded me that this laptop, as small and thin as it was, never felt flimsy or gave the impression it would flex and break apart in my hands. Credit goes to reinforcement ribs like these and other thoughtful touches scattered throughout the design of this tablet.

There are two pieces of shiny metal that appear to serve no immediate purpose, my guess is that they are counterweights like I tend to see in other tablet/laptop convertibles. The one on the right has a thin strip of plastic as electrical insulation so it doesn’t short out the circuitry, and those circuit boards are likely the reason why reinforcement ribs are not symmetric.

With the successful relight of a salvaged Amazon Fire tablet backlight, I’m ready to begin the final chapter of my journey with this Acer Aspire Switch 10 (SW5-012). I’m not the original owner of this machine, so it was never my day-to-day computer. It was retired when it would no longer power-up, and the charger has been lost in the time it was sitting around gathering dust. That nonworking state was how I got it as something to play with.

I diagnosed the power-up problem to a loose cable, and I worked around the lost charger with a hacked-up power connector. That was enough for me to power this system back up. I found it didn’t want to run Linux, but it could run modern Windows 10 surprisingly well. And I didn’t even have to buy another Windows license, as the Windows 8 license embedded in hardware seemed to work just fine. And I undertook some projects like removing its webcam module for security. Because no hacker on the internet can activate a webcam that’s sitting detached in a zip lock bag in another room.

But a computer that runs modern Windows 10 “surprisingly well” for its age is not the same as a computer that runs it well in a useful sense. It’s still an old computer showing its age across the board. Limited RAM, cramped storage, and most personally unsatisfying for me, a low resolution screen. The CPU is not the ill-fated Clover Trail series, but it is still quite slow and is a 32-bit only CPU cut off from modern features of 64-bit operating systems. 32-bit support has already been dropped by MacOS, Ubuntu, even Chrome OS is 64-bit only nowadays.

Finally the system failed again, with the familiar symptom of failing to power up when the power button is pressed. However, this time it was not the loose cable and I failed to find another explanation. It was then retired and I performed a partial disassembly, pulling out its mainboard for a play with a hot air rework station.

I think it is time for me to finish the teardown the rest of the way. The battery pack has already been freed and I think that two-cell lithium ion pack has a future in another project down the line. That leaves the screen, whose low resolution makes it uninteresting as a display but now with two backlight projects under my belt I’m going to see if I can salvage this backlight. Then I’ll see what else might be interesting to salvage from this machine.

Most of what’s left on this convertible laptop main unit were glued together, and I hate fighting glue which is why it halted my earlier teardown. But I have to do it if I want that backlight, so I started thinking about heating up the module to soften the glue. I used to do this with a heat gun, and with the Amazon Fire tablet I used the heated print bed of a retired 3D printer. But we’re now entering the uncomfortably hot phase of Southern California summer. So there’s no need to consume electricity: I can just set this thing out on a brick and let it warm up in the sun and turn my attention to the base section.