A random board of LEDs

I was a bit sick and bored one day so I decided to look into my junk box for something to do. I found this random board with some dual color LEDs on it that came from a "network appliance" which was basically a 1U server with a logo sticked on it. The box had some additional Ethernet ports at the front and the LEDs here were serving as link/activity indication. The board looks as follows:

On the back side we see some chips and a USB-A connector that provides the power and control signals. For some reason (probably because of space constraints) they decided to use a funky cable with USB-A on both ends inside the chassis and plug this board with it. Huh…

The chips are nothing out of the ordinary, a PIC MCU driving some shift registers, connected to USB via a FT245BM RS232<->USB converter:

I thought that figuring out how this works will be a one evening challenge even in my current fuzzy state of mind and I was not wrong :). By first observing that the entire state of the board requires 18 bits I figured that it would be easiest if I just start sending in random 3 byte strings to the device and see if anything lights up. This was a success and I found one of the 3 byte sequences that lit up some of the LEDs. By messing around with all the bits I found what the layout was like. In all 3 bytes two most significant bits need to be fixed, they likely select which shift register chip we're programming. The rest (6 bits) contains the state of the particular LEDs. 3 x 6 == 18 so everything looks OK.

A command sent via the serial port with 115200 8N1 contains 3 bytes
Cmd := byte1 byte2 byte3

The bits for control bytes are as follows:

byte1
00xxxxxx
|||||||`-- 1: LED1 (green)
||||||`--- 1: LED1 (yellow)
|||||`---- 1: LED2 (green)
||||`----- 1: LED2 (yellow)
|||`------ 1: LED3 (green)
||`------- 1: LED3 (yellow)
|`-------- 0
`--------- 0

byte2
01xxxxxx
|||||||`-- 1: LED4 (green)
||||||`--- 1: LED4 (yellow)
|||||`---- 1: LED5 (green)
||||`----- 1: LED5 (yellow)
|||`------ 1: LED6 (green)
||`------- 1: LED6 (yellow)
|`-------- 1
`--------- 0

byte3
10xxxxxx
|||||||`-- 1: LED7 (green)
||||||`--- 1: LED7 (yellow)
|||||`---- 1: LED8 (green)
||||`----- 1: LED8 (yellow)
|||`------ 1: LED9 (green)
||`------- 1: LED9 (yellow)
|`-------- 0
`--------- 1