Constant Color Splash screen: Raspberry pi 3 on boot-up

So, I was working with Raspberry pi 3 of my Anveshan ADI project, and I stumbled upon this error. The error being “4 colors image” or “Rainbow screen” which remains constant on the screen. I searched over the net, and I found some troubleshooting tips specifically for this purpose. My aim was to run the same raspbian image I use for my Raspberry pi 2 onto my new raspberry pi 3.

Initially: The Raspbian image runs seamlessly on raspberry pi 2, but upon loading it into Rpi 3, it gives constant color splash image error.

Possible Solution:

  1. Power Supply: Your power supply to Rpi 3 might not be sufficient. And since boot-up created power surge from supply, it might not just be able to do it.
  2. Faulty kernel.img in boot directory: No reason was mentioned here. Replacing the kernel.img with good one might solve the problem
  3. Update Rpi firmware: By updating Rpi firmware, it will automatically pull latest files and scripts that supports raspberry pi 3.

I started following this one by one, and found Solution 3 to work finally (Phew… :)) Nevertheless, updating the Rpi firmware was not less buggy. Since, I my institute network works under a proxy, I have always some issues in networking related solutions.

I followed this link, which explains updating the firmware for Raspberry pi 3. Here is the Gist overall

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install rpi-update
sudo rpi-update

Incase the last command gives you error referring to outdated ca-certificates or wrong time/date. Do following steps:

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates

This would re-install new ca-certificates. And for updating the time, simply use time module from terminal.

Now, for developers who are working under proxy network, rpi-update command will always betray you. So, I figured out some method which worked perfectly for me.

First wget the rpi-update script from github link

sudo -E wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update

After it is downloaded, move to that directory and compile the script using

sudo chmod +x rpi-update

And now run the script as,

sudo -E ./rpi-update

I hope this works.

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