Tablet keyboard holder teardown and rehousing

Hi everyone, this first post will be about rehousing a low-cost tablet cover with keyboard.

The cover I am talking about is the one presented below.

This case usually can be purchased by less than 20€ and it is for a 10'' tablet. In terms of electronics, it is a very simple PCB with only a couple of resistors, three LED's and it is powered by a microchip MCP23018, which is a 16-Bit I/O Expander. The PCB is pretty generic and can be found in youtube videos, such as: krish new experiments - How to repair USB tablet keyboard

This chip basically presents 16 GPIOs splitted into two sets of eight 8bit GPIOs mapped to collums/rows creating a matrix values for the output which is transferred to the android device using I2C protocol.

[Talk about this protocol with screenshots]

With relation to the case, since the comecial product is a very cheap glued cardboard covered with an, cheap as well, nappa tissue. It is with no surprise that it haven't lasted very long. In particular, my first problem was with the stand that has simply snapped of. After that event the micro-USB connector has been destroyed.

So instead of throwing the cover away I decided to repair the connector, and 3D printing a custom keyboard case and a tablet holder. For this I used FreeCad and managed to draw the following pieces: