I got my new Greenskeeper boards back from the PCB house and started soldering the parts on.

The main greenskeeper board came back great, and works as intended. Mounted inside its caddy, it provides I/O for 12 caddies. As each Shack has 13 slots, the 13th slot is reserved for the Greenskeeper caddy, which contains Greenskeeper and GreenskeeperUSB. USB is for serial console functionality and isn't required unless you want to run consoles.

The other board that came back was GreenskeeperUSB, this is my first attempt at SMD soldering. I got the schematic for the USB hub from the numerous RPI Zero USB hubs that people have designed.

Either the FE1.1s I have are borked, or the schematic I followed is wrong, or I just soldered something wrong, but it doesn't detect properly.

For now I will be using a 13 port USB hub from eBay that has 4x FE1.1s chips on it, which almost exactly what I need but the form factor is wrong and it doesn't fit in a caddy properly.

This is the board.

I only soldered up the 1 chip to test that it is detected, but it isn't. I have ordered some additional FE1.1s, hopefully they arrive soon so I can check that it isn't just a bad batch of them. The first ones I ordered were just inside a small zip baggie, not even a anti-static bag.

For now, the USB hub will do, but once I am free from the USB hub, and can use my own boards, then the unit will be much more compact.

Once that is sorted, I can look to make a cover for the rear to cover all the cables up.

I think the backplane mess of cables could be reduced if there was a low cost GPIO port expander that allowed for more than 8 addresses, the MCP23008 would be perfect for each individual backplane with a shared i2c bus all the way to the main controller, but they only allow for 8 addresses, where I would need at least 12 addresses per shack, using a multiplexer to expand the number of shacks you can run.

If anyone knows a low cost GPIO port expander that can have 12+ addresses, let me know. Another option I toyed with was an atmega168/328 on each backplane to act as a port expander, but this would increase the cost for each backplane considerably.