GeneC's Blog

Pixel Slate Folio Keyboard Teardown & Repair

Author: GENE CHUANG
Published:
Last modified:
Tag: #repair

Table of Contents

Background

My time with the Pixel Slate i5 began in 2019. I was drawn to the convertible form factor, and its ability to run Debian VM & Android apps. Most importantly, the bundle (including the Folio Keyboard & Pixelbook Pen) was on sale for $649 during Black Friday.

Unfortunately, by 2021 the Folio Keyboard started acting up, randomly switching between tablet and laptop modes at certain angles. Eventually, it stopped working completely. A friend of mine ran into the same issue even earlier than I did.

At first, we assumed it was a software glitch, since there was no external damage and he was on the Beta channel. However, we eventually found this thread on Google Support, which suggested the issue was actually a hardware defect involving the internal ribbon cable.

Some of these photos were taken back in 2022, before I had a blog. Even though I've since moved on to a new laptop (the Framework 13!), I still felt it was worth documenting.

Teardown

With no heat gun or professional tools on hand, I made do with a few tools I'd kept from my vocational high school days, and a fair bit of brute force.

To access the area near the pogo pins, the first step was removing the magnet bar and peeling off the rubber strip.

Next, I removed all the screws on the bar and detached it from the base metal strip.

To expose the ribbon cable, I cut through the fabric near the pogo pin connector. This is likely where the cable broke due to repeated folding during daily use.

No big surprise: once the ribbon cable was exposed, the tear became visible immediately.

A big thanks to the thread mentioned above—it helped me locate exactly where the ribbon cable sits.

To confirm there were no other tears, I continued to examine the rest of the ribbon cable.

Fortunately, the rest of it was completely intact.

Repair

Now that I knew where it broke, it was time to fix it.

I started with the pogo pin connector.

First, I removed the small metal plate underneath.

Then, I applied heat under each pogo pin with a soldering iron, which allowed the ribbon cable underneath to be removed easily.

I then soldered wires from each pin to the intact section of the ribbon cable. This was the trickiest step, since the spacing between each line is incredibly tight.

Finally, I applied some tape to protect the soldering points. This is how it looks from the back.

The connector was then placed back into the magnet bar.

Here's the overall look after surgery.

Testing

After I carefully snapped the Pixel Slate onto the modified keyboard, the backlight lit up immediately.

The trackpad cursor appeared as well.