Using psplash to customize a startup sequence - cu-ecen-aeld/buildroot-assignments-base GitHub Wiki

Overview

This page describes how to use a Buildroot package called PSPLASH to customize boot sequence and display a custom static image with a loading bar

The implementation is straightforward and just requires 3 main steps

Adding psplash from make menuconfig
Adding psplash image from make menuconfig (which specifies the path to your custom image)
A Simple script (boot script placed in /etc/init.d through a rootfs overlay) to draw the boot page

These packages can be found under make menuconfig and searching psplash (to initiate the search press "/")

make psplash-dirclean

make psplash

An example script is linked here.
This script can be placed under /etc/init.d with the help of a rootfs overlay
The command psplash draws the image on the screen
Next the idea is to create an effect of a loading bar with the for loop and displaying a message on top of the loading bar.
To control the progress bar we can use the command psplash-write "PROGRESS $i" this sets the progress bar % as the current value of i
To display a message above the progress lets say the current percentage we can use MSG Loading... $i%
Also the stop section of the script can have a different message to indicate reboot.

After following above steps and burning the image on your sd card , you should see your custom image on boot like below

To get a more cleaner boot experience and disabling boot time logs you can disable them by adding 'quiet' in the cmdline.txt file post burning the image on your sd card

root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootwait quiet console=tty1 console=ttyAMA0,115200