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They’re connected to a single USB-C cable. For many technical reasons you can’t have a simple kvm which switches inputs. You’ll need to continuously power all 9

They’re connected to a single USB-C cable. For many technical reasons you can’t have a simple kvm which switches inputs. You’ll need to continuously power all 9 minis some way. All nine USB-C cables will need a continuous, active connection. To do this, you will need a smart controller that switches which port it’s talking to. Or you can stick a relatively cheap device on every mini and and connect it to the network. Having a “controller” for every mini means you can swap single units in both hardware and software very easily. There’s a one-to-one relationship and you don’t have to deal with pairing.

mikepurvis 11mo ago
Just spitballing here, but if your interface to these things is USB-C, you should be able to boot them off an image that has a standard SSH key and then you can get in and ID them from a serial number or MAC address. I don't see the identification part as being a huge part of what's gained with the 1:1 configuration. Is video forwarding part of the product offering, or simply considered required for management functions? Either way, I probably agree that a raspi per unit probably makes sense at a scale of a few dozen racks, but it would be interesting to do the math on when it would be price-efficient to have a 1:n management node scheme. I don't imagine there are many USB-C hubs that support being display sinks on the downstream ports (if that's even possible at all) but perhaps you could use an FPGA to synthesize a small ARM core with a bunch of native USB-C interfaces capable of doing it?