LEDs on the entire keyboard lost their brightness

[wetto]

Hello, a friend of mine recently bought a Redragon Kumara K552 (I also have one) and his unit lost most of its brightness just after a few weeks:



Mine is still going strong after a month, but what may have caused that problem in the first place?

The keyboard in question uses single-color SMD LEDs (it's the first one of the kind I've seen).



Here's some internal pics as well:





P.S.

The reason why the keyboard has that much Resin on its PCB, it's due to the fact that Redragon claims the keyboard is "water-resistant". Bollocks, I say.

[FoxWolf1]

Kind of a silly suggestion, but it couldn't hurt to make sure: have you checked that he didn't accidentally reduce the brightness setting or even toggle it entirely? If I'm reading the K552 manual correctly, fn + - and = are the brightness controls, and fn + scroll lock is the toggle.

[wetto]

Kind of a silly suggestion, but it couldn't hurt to make sure: have you checked that he didn't accidentally reduce the brightness setting or even toggle it entirely? If I'm reading the K552 manual correctly, fn + - and = are the brightness controls, and fn + scroll lock is the toggle.

That's the first thing I told the owner as well.

Nope.jpg, the problem continues.

[Data]

Do the Fn brightness controls in fact work, even to just dim the LEDs down from their current maximum?  If any single part of the controls aren't functioning at some level then I would look at firmware first.  Assuming he can still toggle them on and off (meaning the controls still more or less work), it would either be a problem with the LED controller (chip) or power delivery to the LEDs, like maybe a bad capacitor or resistor?  Either way not easy to diagnose.   

Edit: Some boards have a separate controller for the LEDs, especially for RGB.  But that doesn't appear to be the case here, or I'm not seeing it in any of your photos.  Could still be a bad cap I suppose.

[tp4tissue]

check the voltage across the led..

compare between ur working one vs the dim one.

[jcoffin1981]

I'm looking at the images and it's obvious that the ambient lighting in the first image is considerably brighter, and the image is closer as well than in the second image.  It's therefore difficult to form a conclusion about the dimming of the lights.  I don't see a difference- they look the same to me.

On a side note, I found a video on Youtube that had one or two people claim that their lights appear dimmer a few weeks into ownership than when they first bought the keyboard.  I'm more inclined to believe that there is some function of the board that people are having difficulty adjusting the brightness of the LED's, rather than a defect in the design of the board.  However, this cannot entirely be ruled out.  In the images presented in the OP, the before and after kind of look the same, taking into account the differences in photo quality, distance, background lighting, etc.  All and all, this is a $40 dollar keyboard, which is unheard of in the mechanical keyboard world, with premium boards costing in excess of $250 dollars.

As an earlier poster suggested, taking a multimeter to the lights and seeing if there is a difference between the new board and the defective board.  This does still not rule out however human error in not mastering the lighting controls. 

[Alex Meanberg]

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[Lepidus]

Sorry to hijack the original question, but I'm wondering if you could desolder the switches and replace them with Cherry switches. Has anyone tried that?

It is possible. But you need cherry RGB switches, with clear housings so the led can shine through. Regular cherry switches would still be compatible, but you would loose the backlight.

[Alex Meanberg]

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