Controlling power to PCMCIA slot/card

Question

I'm currently working on a project that utilizes a proprietary PCMCIA radio card to communicate with some wireless devices. I currently have a background process that handles reading data to and from the card and storing it for processing, but I'd like to be able to shut down power to the card when my application is not running. I've done some investigating, and while WMI evidently does support the CIM_PCMCIAController profile in its WIN32_PCMCIAController implementation, the SetPowerState() and Reset() functions are not implemented. Does anyone know of a way (with or without WMI) to control the power state of the slot? I need to be able to programatically both power off and power on either the slot or the card.

Edit

Several people I've spoken to have suggested adding a function to the card that would facilitate this. Unfortunately modifying the card to provide this sort of functionality really isn't an option right now.

Edit 2

I've confirmed that the device does show up in the Device Manager under the "Multifunction adapters" category, though neither disabling the device nor the PCMCIA controller itself from here has any effect on the power of the card.

Answer 1

Presumably, the device has it's own drivers of some sort and shows-up in Device Manager.

In which case, you could disable the device by calling devcon (Command-line equivalent of Device Manager), from inside your program. This would make windows handle shutting down the device.

devcon disable. See Example #31 for an example of how to shutdown device by a specific device id.

Am I going on the right-lines, or have I misinterpreted your question?

Answer 2

I'm curious, but does using the "Safely remove hardware..." button turn off the power to the device, enough to satisfy your requirement?

If that works, you could programatically register and unregister the device through Microsoft's API. Here is a page that shows a couple functions that might be helpful for this scenario: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363234(VS.85).aspx