I fried my Pi Zero W's Wifi

Support
1

Hi,

some nights ago I soldered the GPIO header to my Pi Zero W. I thought it was a clean job and tried to power it on - didn’t boot. Then tired me noticed too late that some solder had dropped which created a short, on the backside between the Pin 1 and the nearby pad from the SD card module. Powered off again and removed the solder.

It booted fine and all looked good until I noticed the onboard Wifi was not working. And it hasn’t since. Tried different raspian installations, which had worked befored and also clean images. But no luck. There is no Wifi device showing up at all (lsusb, iwconfig, etc., even checked rfkill). External Wifi dongle works instantly. Bluetooth, by the way is still working.

So please be warned to solder carefully…

Any suggestions or confirmation Wifi will remain dead?

2

sorry your query fell by the wayside… very surprised the bluetooth would still work but not the WiFi, operated from the same chip AFAIK. Does iw phy return anything?

3

No worries! For my project I don’t absolutely need Wifi, so it’s more an inconvenience.
iw phy does not give any output at all… (it does when a USB Wifi is connected).

4

hum, strange - but my conclusion would be the same as yours, that the WiFi chip is damaged somehow, or possibly there is still a short somewhere that affects the WiFi functionality solely.