Okay, just a heads up to anyone trying to get these cards working, DO NOT flash the Lenovo firmware or firmware in the bundle. It will secure-fw your card and you will no longer be able to flash unsigned firmware to the card. I got around this by using a CH341A mini programmer and a russian CH341 programmer software to flash the Winbond 128MBIT WSQ128 SPI flash to backup and wipe the firmware and then I could have the card boot into frimware recovery mode and flash unsigned firmware.
For the longest time I didn't know how to do my ROM work using a CH341 on a Mac ... and was one of the only reasons for which I kept another little PC (now I have them for other reasons, but I still FAR and away prefer the HEX editors, etc., on Macs) ...
Did you know that there's a cake-simple terminal application you can do ROM flashing via MacOS ..?
The terminal app is called FlashROM
I can send you a tutorial on that (very easy and you're obviously super knowledgeable so usually I'd expect to be asking you questions). ... and, if you wanted to use a different BIOS interface than the CH341, I'll look up the name of the other application that works with that.
Anyway, nicely done reprogramming these. Gives me an idea of how to get SFP28 cards for a little less than market now, too.
I went crazy trying to find ways to read the ROM off my CH341 and it just never dawned on me that the computer was already seeing the programmer (device) I just needed to install the application and dependencies to make it work (for years, to my shame). Maybe this helps someone else.
If you have a ... TL866
There's another application called called
MiniPro ...
Anyway, thanks for this post.