Raspberry Pi 5 Wi-Fi Problems (and Solutions)

I’m developing a course on building a premium 3D-printed Vewlix countercade. Midway through the process, my Retropie setup started acting up. I encountered Raspbery Pi 5 Wi-Fi Problems; the connection kept dropping and wouldn’t restart after a reboot. This led to several days of troubleshooting madness. Diagnosis was complicated by the fact that I had just completed a USB relocation mod that involved microsoldering wires to the test pads beneath the USB ports.

In the back of my mind I was convinced that I had broken something or that modding the USB port was simply not viable. One concern was that I hadn’t been able to solder to the ground test pad and had instead moved the wire to GPIO pin 9, a ground shared by my GPIO amp hat. I didn’t know it at the time but this had the possibility of introducing a ground loop which in turn had the potential to introduce electrical instability. Confusing matters further, I elicited a false positive when I removed the amp hat and Wi-Fi immediately started working again. So, I desoldered the USB mod’s ground wire and re-routed it such that it could share the terminal block of the amp hat’s power supply ground. This had No Discernable Effect. I removed the amp hat again, only this time, wifi still didn’t work. I removed power from the amp to see if it was an electrical interference thing, and it was not. My Raspberry Pi 5 Wi-Fi Problems were far from over.

Much of the troubleshooting was guided by ChatGPT, but in the end, an old-timey YouTube search finally put me on the right track. I found a video that suggested that my Pi 5 Wi-Fi dying (say that five times fast) was a fairly common issue and that it could be fixed by turning off power management. I tried it and wifi began to work… and then stopped again. Unbeknownst to me, power management turns RIGHT BACK ON after reboot. As I am not used to computers disobeying my sudo commands, I nearly gave up on troubleshooting power management. As luck would have it though, I thought to run sudo iwconfig one last time and uncovered the betrayal. After consulting ChatGPT, I found a systemd solution for turning it off and keeping it off. It worked… and then it stopped working again, again.

This suggested that it wasn’t a Wi-Fi power management issue. Surprise! There are multiple, overlapping, and seemingly conflicting Wi-Fi power management systems. In addition to the Power Management power management, there’s also Power Save Mode power management. It turns off Wi-Fi when EmulationStation fires up its screensaver. After learning of this non-sense, I created another systemd solution. And it worked, finally! No more Raspberry Pi 5 Wi-Fi Problems.

Given the false positives, endless variables, wild goose chases, and multiple, overlapping, co-conspiratorial power management systems, I am shocked and relieved I was actually able to fix this ridiculousness (or did I?)! I learned a little more about electrical systems and of the importance of unreasonable, blind persistence. But most importantly, I have a solution for you if you’re having Raspberry Pi 5 Wi-Fi Problems!

Turn Off Power Management, for Fucking Good This Time

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/wifi-powermanagement-off.service

Add the following:

[Unit]
Description=Disable WiFi Power Management
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save and exit. Then do this:

sudo systemctl enable wifi-powermanagement-off
sudo systemctl start wifi-powermanagement-off

Fuck You, Power Save Slut!

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/wifi-powersave-off.service

Add the following:

[Unit]
Description=Disable WiFi Power Save
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/iw dev wlan0 set power_save off
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable wifi-powersave-off.service
sudo systemctl start wifi-powersave-off.service

Hopefully that works for you! Good luck!

If you’re still having Pi 5 WiFi problems, check out: https://cyberspacemanmike.com/2025/02/25/pi-5-wi-fi-die-retry-part-2-of-the-unyielding-saga-of-troubleshooting-raspberry-pi-5-wi-fi/