Remotely Change Splash Image

Product support balenaOS
1

Is it possible to remotely update the splash image?

Using the Balena CLI, I can ssh into a device and access the splash image in /mnt/boot/splash. Using wget I can download a new image and replace the old splash image. However, I would like to make sure this isn’t going to break something.

2

Hey there! Its absolutely possible to change the splash screen. You may even use our official CLI to preload an OS image with a custom splash image: https://www.balena.io/docs/reference/balena-cli/#--splash-image--s-splashimagepng

4

Thanks for the suggestion, however I need to update the splash screen remotely. Is there a way to update the splash screen remotely, without having physical access to the device?

5

For future reference - probably not. From Issues · balena-io/docs · GitHub

we encourage any user to go and replace that logo with their own. All you have to do is replace the splash/resin-logo.png file that you will find in the first partition of our images (boot partition) with your own image. NOTE: As it currently stands plymouth expects the image to be named resin-logo.png.

Balena docs:

If you would like to replace the balena logo with your custom splash logo, replace splash/resin-logo.png located in the boot partition of the image.

Changing that file is the normal method and makes sense: how else to edit a file on the boot partition. I would not expect different, valid contents of a .png file to cause the boot to fail, not that this sort of update sounds like one anyone should do repeatedly.

6

Hi,
So, as it was mentioned before, the way we support changing the boot splash image is via updating the image before flashing the device.
A feature that would allow changing the boot splash remotely has been discussed internally, and it’s our roadmap.

We’ll update this thread when we have the news.

8

Hey there,
You can now remotely set splash images by setting a BALENA_HOST_SPLASH_IMAGE config variable on balenaCloud. Your image should be a base64 encoded PNG image of max size 10KB. This should be possible on devices running at least balenaOS version 2.67.0.

Cheers

10

Would it be possible to get the max size increased from 10KB? Even the standard splash image balena-logo.png is greater than that, it’s 13KB.

I’ve tried all kinds of tricks to reduce the size of our splash image and I can’t get it to less than 10KB. I can work with a 20KB limit…

12

Thanks for reaching out.

I have asked the team internally if we could increase the limit from 10kb, and also now have a github issue to track this: Increase the BALENA_HOST_SPLASH_IMAGE size to 20kb · Issue #675 · balena-io/open-balena-api · GitHub

Feel free to ping us if you have any additional query.