How do we test Airport wifi bluetooth cards for Mac Pro 4,1 5,1
Posted by Bill Dong on
We sell wifi & bluetooth cards, for both bluetooth 4.0 and 4.2. It's not easy to test those cards to see if they work or not. For a full installation, you need to connect four anntentas on this card and it's not a simple job since the anntena connectors are very small it may take long time to finish connectiing them. Also, those anntena connectors are pretty fragile so you cannot keep connecting and disconnecting many times. Fortunately we don't need to connect anntenas before we see if this card work or not. Without anntenas connected, we still can determine if a card is working or not. For a working card, both wifi and bluetooth should be able to be turned on even withouot anntenas. However, this is still not convenient enough to test thos cards for mac pro. Each time we install a card on mac pro, we have to pull off CPU tray and plug the card onto our adapter. This is still time consuming and pulling off CPU tray too many times may break the tray.
So, we found a better solution. We test it on a PC. We bought a PCIe card that is essentially an adapter for Airport cards. Then we can plug the adapter to our PC. It has a USB header to support bluetooth. At first, we tried to run Linux on that PC and use "hciconfig" command to determine bluetooth revisions on one card. However, it seems that Linux's tool may not correctly report bluetooth status always. So, guess what, we run Mac OS Mojave on our PC to correctly check wifi and bluetooth status on a card. Basicly we build a hackintosh PC through clover bootloader. With those setup, we can conveniently test each Airport card we sell.
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- Tags: Mac Pro 4.1, Mac Pro 5.1