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Desolder wifi/bluetooth module on a Raspberry Pi 4

Raspberry Pi Asked on December 21, 2021

What does the process of physically removing the wifi/bluetooth module look like for a Raspberry Pi 4? How hard it is for a beginner & for someone experienced with soldering? And how likely it is to damage some neighbouring component?

I don’t care to save the module for re-use later on, just want to get it off even if that means damaging it.

This is for an air-gapped device, so physically unavailable hardware is much better than hardware disabled by software. I read this answer on a similar question but the one of RPi4 looks bigger, not sure how it looks under that metal shield. Couldn’t find a guide on the same.

Evaluating RPi4 over other models which lack WiFi/Bluetooth capabilities purely on the basis of performance. CPU even though is only a little better, but memory seems to be a lot faster than any other models.

2 Answers

I desoldered the wifi chip with hot air gun and Rpi seems to be working just fine. Also disabled wifi and BT in /boot/config.txt (maybe not necessary).

Answered by luki on December 21, 2021

If you want to physically disable Wifi/BT, the easiest way is to disconnect the antenna, or short the antenna output to ground via a 1nF capacitor.

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The capacitor is there to avoid having an actual short to ground, which could blow the chip up. 1nF is only 0.06 Ohm at 2.5GHz, so for RF purposes it's as good as a short. A typical antenna impedance is 50 Ohm. Having a 0.06 Ohm path to ground means that only about 0.1% of the transmitter signal will reach the antenna, while 99.9% will be lost. That's about 60 dB attenuation.

Considering the WiFi signal already starts at about -30dBm, attenuation by another 60 will bring the signal down to -90 dBm, which is barely above the thermal noise. This means a few meters away from the device (another -10 dB), you won't be able to receive the signal even theoretically.

Removing the WiFi/BT module is trivial with the right equipment (heat up the board and lift the shield and the IC up with a vacuum pen), but without a schematic I would not give you any guarantees that the rest of the Pi will work once the WiFi chip is gone. And even if the schematic is released, it would be quite a task to analyse it and create a modified device tree for the kernel to correctly understand the new hardware configuration.

Answered by Dmitry Grigoryev on December 21, 2021

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