Disabling WiFi and Bluetooth on a Raspberry Pi 3 running Ubuntu Mate 16.04.2 LTS

I like to use Raspberry Pis for a lot of my projects. They are cheap, easy to configure and they can be powered by the 2A USB socket found on the back of most modern TV’s.

Running Ubuntu Mate 16.04.2 with the GUI disabled they make a great little server.

Something I like to do is disable Bluetooth and WiFi as these are not generally things that I run on a server.

There are probably a variety of ways to achieve this but this is how I do it.

Log into your Raspberry Pi via SSH and using your favourite text editor open the file /boot/config.txt

Add the following two lines:

dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt
dtoverlay=pi3-disable-wifi

Save and exit and then run the following command:

sudo systemctl disable hciuart

Fire up the text editor again and open the file /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf

Add the following lines:

#disable wifi
blacklist brcmfmac
blacklist brcmutil
#disable bluetooth
blacklist btbcm
blacklist hci_uart

Save and reboot

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