Raspberry Pi Version 2 Wifi Inconsistent Connectivity

I’d had some difficulty with WiFi consistently staying connected on each of my Raspberry Pi units.  I’d had a little time to look into it, but no research had offered an answer and the only fixes I’d come up with was a shell script I wrote to force a restart of the NIC, which helped some, but no improvement when I added an antenna, (I considered all the wires, sensors, etc. might be interfering with the signal.)

Finally this weekend, started to dig around and noted that although in the user interface, it showed both connections to my home WiFi and my Smartphone as enabled, the /etc/wpa-supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf showed the following for each entry:

disabled=1

I couldn’t find any support documentation that backed up the theory that there was a mismatch in what the GUI stated vs. the configuration file that is the backbone of the settings, but with all the other data involved, it made sense that this should be set to either:

enabled=1

Or

disabled=0

So, I took a deep breath and updated one WiFi connection entry in the file with “disabled=0”, saved and rebooted.

Sure enough, my connection to my home WiFi stayed connected and consistent to the internet.  No more disconnects and no more challenges with connectivity.

Another change I made afterwards, which is backed up with support from multiple resources is editing the /etc/network/interfaces configuration file.  Scan the file and look for an entry that says:

auto wlan0

If you don’t see this entry, add a line to the top of the file, (you should see at least one other line starting with “auto” so add a line under that one if there is), save and reboot.  This will update your RPI to start the WiFi NIC automatically, which will then in turn, connect to your WiFi network.

I’ve made this change to four of my five RPI, (the PiZero Jessie load doesn’t experience this issue and was what triggered that it was a software issue with Wheezy and not a hardware problem….)

Kellyn-1, Frustration-0