In my last Reprap-Revival related post I went on about upgrading to RPi4 & wifi (from RPi3B & LAN) for Octopi. Subsequently, I have found that the wifi just drops out after 5mins or so for no rhyme or reason. Massively annoying and unworkable for the stability you need for a 3D print. I tried a fair few things to fix, that I am not going to bother writing about since none worked.

What fixed it

Taking the SD card out of the RPi4 and putting it in the former RPi3B and putting the RPi4 away in a box 😋. The old RPi3B worked (with wifi) off the bat with no dropout. Loading times etc are noticeably slower than the RPi4, but it works.

Not sure if a power thing or what – I know that is an ‘issue’ with RPi4.

Conclusion

Don’t try to fix it if not broken.

No actually. I take that back. Do try, but be okay with going back to with what you had before if not working out.

Oh. One thing. Power Management.

There was one thing I did when running on RPi4…which did not help, but it persists now on RPi3B de facto. I don’t really want to break anything so am leaving as-is.

Via iwconfig I noticed that the wlan0 had power management on. I followed instructions verbatim from here:

… by simply adding a line to /etc/rc.local

/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off

Add that ahead of exit 0

and it will run at every boot.