Customising Splash Screen on Your Raspberry Pi

Before opening Raspberry Pi’s desktop GUI by default a rainbow screen displays followed by Raspberry Pi’s logo and command lines scrolling down. But you can disable these and add any image of your choice by following these steps:

REMOVE THE TEXTS AND LOGO

Start from removing all the default screens and also the 4 Raspberry images. Also, disable all the bootup lines.

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Write this in your terminal and open  /boot/config.txt, add “disable_splash=1” to remove the color test/rainbow screen. Now write

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

At the end of the line add “logo.nologo” for removing the Raspberry logo.

Disable the commands and various bits of the kernel by adding “consoleblank=0 loglevel=1 quiet” next to “logo.nologo”. Make sure everything is in one line. After that press ctrl+X, Y for save and Enter to return to the command line.

Now remove the login prompt by running

sudo systemctl disable getty@tty3

ADDING NEW SPLASH SCREEN

Now place the desired picture as your new splash screen. To make the image readable install fbi, the image reader and the framebuffer. For installation write 

sudo apt install fbi

It will take a few seconds to install. After this we have to create a file by

sudo nano /file/systemd/system/splashscreen.service

In the file add the following things :

[Unit]
Description=Splash screen
DefaultDependencies=no
After=local-fs.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/fbi -d /dev/fb0 --noverbose -a /home/pi/image001.png
StandardInput=tty
StandardOutput=tty

[Install]
WantedBy=sysinit.target

The “-d/dev/fb0” instruction tells the fbi which image to display. 

“--noverbose” will suppress the fbi ‘status bar’ at the bottom.

If the selected image is in the proper measurements then no editing is required if not then “-a” will act as editor.

“ /home/pi/image.png” is the name of the image. You can update your image name here.

Through "StandardInput" and "StandardOutput" the fbi get access to tty. 

The "DefaultDependencies" will override the systemd’s default behaviour.

The fbi will be loaded in the boot process when ‘WantedBy’ is accessed, not before the file system (and hence image) are ready, through the “After” option.

REBOOT YOUR PI

Enable your service by running 

sudo apt-get update

sudo systemctl enable splashscreen

Now reboot the Raspberry Pi and verify your image by

sudo reboot

Through the following steps, we can disable the default screens and can add our desired image photo/animation/video as your splash or bootup screen.

Hope you enjoyed this article...

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