Opening And Closing Multiple Drives

Question

I am working on a DVD burning robot. As part of the process I need to open and close the DVD trays, to allow the robot to pick the disks up after burning. I have however run into a problem. I can only control the eject on one dvd recorder! Since I have two this is a problem. I've been looking at this for hour and can't figure out what's wrong. It can control 1 dvd fine, but the when I instatiate it on another class it doesn't work. Here is the class below. I know I am probably missing something simple but for the life of me I can't figure it out.

Public Class openCloseDrive
'Api call to send the commands to the mci device
Private Declare Function mciSendString Lib "winmm.dll" Alias _
    "mciSendStringA" (ByVal lpstrCommand As String, ByVal _
        lpstrReturnString As String, ByVal uReturnLength As Integer, _
            ByVal hwndCallback As Integer) As Integer
'
'Api call to check for mci success or error
Private Declare Function mciGetErrorString Lib "winmm.dll" Alias _
    "mciGetErrorStringA" (ByVal dwError As Integer, ByVal lpstrBuffer _
        As String, ByVal uLength As Integer) As Integer

'will hold the mci return value
Dim retVal As Integer = Nothing

'This will contain the drive letter of the specified cd drive.
Dim _cdDrive As String = Nothing



Public Sub New(_driveLetter As String)
    _cdDrive = Chr(34) & _driveLetter & Chr(34)
End Sub

Public Function Open() As Integer
    'This will open the DVD Tray
    Dim retVal As Integer
    'This will Open the CD Drive Tray.
    mciSendString("open " & _cdDrive & " type cdaudio alias cd wait shareable", 0, 0, 0)
    retVal = mciSendString("set cd door open", 0, 0, 0)

    Return retVal
End Function

Public Function Close() As Integer
    'this Will close the DVD tray
    Dim retVal As Integer

    'This will Close the CD Drives Tray door.
    mciSendString("open " & _cdDrive & " type cdaudio alias cd wait shareable", 0, 0, 0)
    retVal = mciSendString("set cd door closed", 0, 0, 0)

    Return retVal
End Function


Public ReadOnly Property devices_InternalMCIStatus() As String
    '
    'Check the mci device to see if a error occured, and/or give 
    'some type of description even if everything was executed ok.
    '
    'Use this property if you want to, after each command you carried 
    'out to check and see if the command was successfully executed or 
    'not. It will tell you the status whether it was successful or not.
    '
    Get
        '
        'Make the length of this buffer 255 spaces since the returned
        'value could get pretty long, depending on what is going on.
        Dim buf As String = Space(255)

        mciGetErrorString(retVal, buf, 255)

        Return buf

        buf = Nothing

    End Get

End Property

End Class

Answer 1

I think I found a solution. Its a command line program called cdrecord.exe. By sending a command line option to it it seems to have no problem opening and closing the trays!