Razer Blade 18 base model no RGB lighting

jamesmacwhite
My Razer Blade 18 model no longer has any RGB lighting. The keyboard is still working in terms of key presses and all keys but no matter what I do, I cannot get the RGB lighting to work or even turn on now. I have tried uninstalling and running the driver cleanup process and then reinstalling Synapse 3, this hasn't worked. I have reset the BIOS to factory and also cleared the NVRAM in hope it's just some firmware glitch, but nothing works. I started seeing some weird behaviour with the RGB lighting a couple of weeks ago where the RGB lighting was on, but Synapse couldn't control it and neither could OpenRGB, then the lighting would sometimes be off despite showing as on, but then come back on after sleep or a reboot. Another time I noticed the lighting would be glitched and only light up on a small part of the left side and not matching the set Chroma profile, now however it appears to be permanently off and I haven't managed to get any life for the RGB lighting at all. The Synapse software is set to 100% brightness, the Chroma studio profile shows the lighting sequence in the software but this is not visible at all on the actual keyboard, equally the visualiser plugin does not show any lighting despite that also showing a preview of what Synapse is showing. To me this indicates the actual keyboard RGB lighting has failed, so it's hardware failure and no software fix will do it. I have done a tear down of my Blade 2018 to reseat ribbon cables in the event something had been knocked lose but this didn't help and the lighting seems completely dead. I'm out of warranty with Razer, but quite happy to replace the keyboard, I've located a UK Razer keyboard matching my model. I've already replaced the battery, given I had battery bloat after two years so I'm quite familiar with the internals and already teared it down right to the keyboard to reseat cables, so looks like it's a full keyboard replacement, at a pretty hefty cost, given the keyboard parts outside of Razer seem to be limited in terms of stock. In the event I've missed something, I'm posting if anyone else has any ideas, otherwise I'm committing to replacing my keyboard. My research suggests the RGB controller/hardware is part of the keyboard assembly, so replacing it might be the only solution. I'm not aware of any other controller or component in the laptop that controls the RGB functionality, but I'm not entirely familiar with the schematics of it, but if anyone has any others ideas, please let me know.