Well, it appears that everyone wants an easier way to modify their Broadcom 802.11a/b/g PCI/PCIe/miniPCI/miniPCIe cards.

Creating an open source utility is a good concept, it will appeal to the masses and resolve a lot of configuration issues with card detection.

This utility can be broken down into 3 sections (well 5 but two don't really count):

1. card detection
2. sprom identification (to determine the correct sprom table required)
3. sprom crc/decode/encode/read/write (the meat of the utility)
4. CLI or GUI interface
5. configure/make or XCode

There are several ways that #1 can be achieved, I think the easiest is to use existing API functionality whenever possible and OS X has most of the detection routines built-in.

#2, it shouldn't be that difficult because current options are 128 bytes or 440 bytes.

#3, I have these routines pretty much written out which I could contribute to the project.

#4, should the utility be CLI or GUI based.

#5, will this be a Mac specific project (XCode - my preference) or not (configure/make).

If the project becomes beneficial I may even contribute some closed source code that would allow the Broadcom 802.11n based cards to be used with the utility.

If you have programming experience and would like to see this utility become a reality then lets get something rolling, there will also be the need for other various tasks like documentation, project leader, research and searching, testing and reporting so there is room for the non programmers to become involved but typically speaking, if your programming in the project then being a project leader at the same time only introduces biasing and effects the overall worthiness of the utility so in my opinion, the project leader's only responsibility is to lead the project and keep it on track.

If you can't commit to the project then the project is not for you, it's hard to gain any momentum if people come and go without anything being completed.

The only glory in this project would be in it's completion with credit given to those involved, you wont be paid but it would be something you can attach to your resume as project accomplishments you've been a part of and more than likely the project would gain some publicity once a working model is available.

If you're interested in getting involved in the project then post a reply, if you just want to comment or gripe about the project then please refrain from doing so at this time until a proper forum can be established for the project where you can leave all the comments you want.

I'm surprised, everyone asks me about this so I offer something publicly and no one seems interested, maybe open source projects are not the way to go if no one is willing to participate.

No one???

Why ask me to become involved in a project if no one is really interested in it???

The story about the little red hen was written with osx86 in mind.

Maybe your 'meat of the utility' could be used by a small-ish Perl/Python/shell script that can call ioctl to find the card and version etc, confirm it with the user, then flash it. It'd be run from the terminal (maybe only ATM?) but I would assume pretty user friendly, it could even be made a single file by embedding the executable bits directly in the script.

I'm sorry I'm not too interesting in joining any sort of project here, I thought i would say that all that's apparently needed is a more automated way of using the programs you posted.

The programs I posted wont reflash the wireless cards so your approach while interesting wont work.

What I have posted are utilities that people asked for to obtain the information and allow setting some cards.

To do a wireless card you have to download the data, modify it, update the checksum and re-flash the data and so far linux is the only free solution and as I found out the programs to do it in linux require fixing because they modify the wrong data and their interest lay in getting the N_PHY and LP_PHY ABI.

Currently the free solution in Linux does certain cards, none of the N-based cards because they do not have the N_PHY or LP_PHY reverse engineered ABI and from what I could tell it will be a long time before this occurs.

This is not to say that I am not capable of doing it, this is only to say that there is no free software to do any N-based cards and there is NO solution available to achieve the task in OS X outside of the software I have and unless there is an open sourced project I'm not about to donate any proprietary code.

So very true.