Raspberry Pi

How to disable your Raspberry Pi’s WiFi | 3 Easy Methods

WiFi is one of the crucial features of your Raspberry Pi device that enables you to access the Internet and perform online activities. However, it may consume your device resources if it turns on for a longer time and may reduce your device speed. If you are working on an important task on your Raspberry Pi device that doesn’t require a WiFi connection, you may disable it to boost your working speed.

If you don’t know how to disable your WiFI on Raspberry Pi, you should follow this article, where you will see several ways to do this task.

How to Disable your Raspberry Pi’s WiFi

There are three important methods to disable WiFi on Raspberry Pi and the details of these methods are discussed in the following sections:

1: Disable WiFi through Taskbar

This method is the easiest one to follow for the Raspberry Pi users to disable the WiFi. To perform this method, you will need to go to the WIFI icon that appears on your taskbar and then right click on it.

There you will see the option “Turn Off Wireless LAN” and as soon as you click on the option, your WiFi will be disabled.

2: Disable WiFi through Command Line Interface

You can also disable WiFi on Raspberry Pi through a command-line interface called “rkfill” that allows you to block and unblock WiFi on your device. To perform this method, first, you have to install the “rkfill” utility through the following command:

$ sudo apt install rkfill

After completing the installation, apply the following command to disable WiFi on Raspberry Pi.

$ sudo rkfill block wifi

To enable the WiFi any time on Raspberry Pi device, you can use the following command:

$ sudo rkfill unblock wifi

3: Disable WiFi through Configuration File

The boot configuration file of Raspberry Pi provides you with the option to enable and disable your WiFi connection any time. For this purpose, you just need to add a one-line text to disable the WiFi on your device.

To perform this method, first you will need to open the boot configuration file through following command:

$ sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Scroll down to the end of the file and there add the following text right below the “[all]” text as shown below:

dtoverlay=disable-wifi

Save the file by pressing the “CTRL+X” keys, use “Y” to confirm the changes and press enter to go back to the command-line terminal. After saving the file, reboot the device and when it restarts, the WiFi will be disabled on your device.

Conclusion

Disabling WiFi on Raspberry Pi boosts your device speed and is important when you don’t require internet connectivity or have an Ethernet cable for high-speed internet. The above three methods will be the easiest to follow for the Raspberry Pi users who want to disable WiFi, and it depends entirely on you to pick the best one to disable the WiFi on Raspberry Pi.

About the author

Awais Khan

I'm an Engineer and an academic researcher by profession. My interest for Raspberry Pi, embedded systems and blogging has brought me here to share my knowledge with others.