One thing first. If you build it with the changes you mentioned above, you should already have that firmware in there. Did you not build it with your changes?
Second, can you disable resin-init-flasher.service from running? You could delete the symlink from the USB stick that makes it run or just rename the script so the service does not execute it. Mount the USB thumb drive on your computer and rename the script
<USB stick mount location>/usr/bin/resin-init-flasher
to something else.
Then boot with the USB stick again. It won’t provision this time but it won’t shutdown either so you can press CTRL + ALT + F2 and get to a login prompt if it is a development image.
Once you login, wait a half a minute to a minute to give the vpn service some time to auth. Then execute
journalctl --no-pager -u openvpn-resin
and paste the output here.
Also, check with
ifconfig
if there is any wifi interface with IP assigned. If not, run
journalctl --no-pager -u NetworkManager
and paste the output here while also double checking that the resin-wifi01 file is present in
/mnt/boot/system-connections/
and has the correct credentials (don’t paste that file here as it has your wifi credentials)
Thanks