Recommended Wifi/BTLE card for cMP 5,1 to enable Apple Watch unlock?

[SemoTech]

Thanks for the pointers @haralds and glad to hear it is working for you.

I guess the only thing I did not do previously is to issue the 2nd perl command to patch the whitelist:

$ sudo -E perl -pi -e "s/\Mac-00BE6ED71E35EB86/\Mac-F221BEC8\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0/" /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AirPortBrcm4360.kext/Contents/MacOS/AirPortBrcm4360

Seems you have to run "sudo mount -uw /" and not just "mount -uw /" before the perl string swap command, otherwise even with SIP disabled you get:

Can't remove /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AirPortBrcm4360.kext/Contents/MacOS/AirPortBrcm4360: Read-only file system, skipping file.

Alternatively, if one has a HEX editor one can use that, as follows:

Since the strings are different between: Mac-00BE6ED71E35EB86 and Mac-F221BEC8 the perl command translates the \0's into just HEX 00 pairs, to fill in the ID.

In that case
"Mac-00BE6ED71E35EB86" is "4d 61 63 2d 30 30 42 45 36 45 44 37 31 45 33 35 45 42 38 36" in HEX
and
"Mac-F221BEC8\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0" is "4d 61 63 2d 46 32 32 31 42 45 43 38 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00" in HEX with 8 pairs of 0's appended to maintain the pointer.

The original "AirPortBrcm4360" file code:

Becomes:

If the "AirPortBrcm4360" binary file is manually edited, one must issue:

$ sudo chown -R 0:0 /S*/L*/E*
$ sudo chmod -R 755 /S*/L*/E*
$ sudo kextcache -i /

If using just the perl command, you'd still need to issue:

$ sudo kextcache -i /

After the kext cache resets with the command above, and asside from other warnings, you'd get this pertinent warning, but it's OK to safely ignore:

Kext with invalid signature (-67061) allowed: <OSKext 0x7fd218c6c810 [0x7fff8566ecc0]> { URL = "file:///System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AirPortBrcm4360.kext/", ID = "com.apple.driver.AirPort.Brcm4360" }

And finally reboot....

Sadly for me [Continuity Camera] and Apple Watch [Auto Unlock] are still NOT working!

Thanks for trying @haralds.

 

[SemoTech]

Solved it! Problem was with Catalina, as it was using the dosdude1 patcher to work on the cMP 5,1. As soon as I upgraded to Monterey 12.0.1 using Open Core Legacy Patcher it ALL started working again!

The upgrade was worth it tho as now with the Bluetooth 4.2 chip I'll get more time out of the cMP 5,1