Hi @ASwingler at the highest level, a board integration consists of adding the mender client and configuration files to your Linux runtime as well the bootloader integration for your particular hardware. This generally consists of the custom boot logic that handles the boot time selection of the A or B partition. Finally, there is the setting up of the multiple partition structure.
In your case, you have a custom golden master image that you wish to integrate with Mender. This is exactly what our mender-convert utility is designed for. Essentially, you create an image from your Rasbian boot SD Card, then use that as input to mender-convert. This utility will then add the mender client and config files into your filesystem, add the appropriate bootloader and partition setup and create two images:
- The sdimg file which gets written to a new SD Card and booted up to provision a new device.
- The mender file which is an OTA artifact that can be deployed to the system from #1 above.
Note that the recommended workflow is that you make all your changes on the original image which does not have Mender integrated, and then when you have a new release, create a new input image and rerun the mender-convert setup.
Hope that helps clarify.
Drew