Add Network Working

As I said, I've been playing with Chris Davies' software a bit. I just got the 'a' command working for the first time, which is the add network command. It's a lot more simple than I thought a first. It's a real advantage decoding this stuff when you have so much smart logic on the card.

Most of what we first thought were complex encodings for adding the card appear to really just be garbage left in memory from previous operations. Even watching the Windows software after a log is dumped, you sometimes see the log data come back in the results of subsequent commands. This makes things a bit harder to decode and it would be really nice if the card zeroed things out, first.

Anyway, in the case of add network, the command is a struct like this:

struct add_net {
char cmd; // always 'a'
char net_name_len;
char net_name[32]; // always null padded
char net_password_len;
char net_password_hex[32];
};

Notice that there isn't a field for the encryption type, channel, MAC address of the AP or anything. The card evidently figures this all out internally, which is really nice.

Oh, and you know how you actually have to let the manager software successfully test for a network before you can add it? I think that's a bit of a disadvantage sometimes. Like if you're going over to your Aunt Betty's house and you know her essid before you go, you can't program it into the card in advance. You would need to be there before you can add it. This is a pretty user-friendly feature because it ensures that people don't mistakenly add networks and get confused about why it never works when they just entered the password wrong. I think generally this is way nicer than what I have on my desktop today.

Well, that feature looks to actually be implemented in the manager software, not the card. I believe you can just issue an 'add' command to the card without actually testing it, first. The manager software just happens to always test it in advance. It might be nice to have a "force-add" feature in the future.