Question

A friend asked me for a program to switch his integrated wifi card off and on. I’ve googled it with no luck. Can someone tell me if there’s any way to do that natively in python?

Answer 1

Does the solution have to be native? I would use a utility called ‘devcon’ which is created by Microsoft. You could use Python to call devcon and parse the output and disable the required device(s).

Here’s an example:

http://en.kioskea.net/faq/1886-enable-disable-a-device-from-the-command-line

You can get the list of network devices with

devcon hwids =net

You can try to parse the one with WiFi in it and the lines that start with PCI.
Or you can do something like:
devcon disable hwids =net, unfortunately this disables the ethernet devices as well.
If you need to just disconnect from WiFi you can use netsh wlan disconnect

EDIT: Ok, finally found the perfect solution (IMHO).
You will need to install two packages pywin32 and wmi.
Using WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) bindings for Python this becomes pretty easy.

import wmi
cur=wmi.WMI()
wireless_devices=cur.query("select * from Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE NetConnectionID = 'Wireless Network Connection'")
for device in wireless_devices:
    device.Disable()

If it returns a tuple with the first value of (0) it succeeded. Obviously, this must be run as an administrator (otherwise you will get 5 as the return value).