Docker

Kubernetes provides a framework to orchestrate multiple containers, verses working with one container at a time. To practice managing containers I opted to build a Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pis using Rancher. Rancher came about soon after Docker introduced containers to the market, and provides an open-source platform for enterprises to easily use Kubernetes in their environment. K3S is a Rancher product that allows you to deploy a Kubernetes cluster using a single binary file thats less than 40MB. K3S is ideal for Raspberry Pis, since traditionally building a Kubernetes cluster on Pis could be too much for them to handle. In addition to K3S this is what I used to build a simple Kubernetes cluster in my home lab: ...

The final step in building my bird cam was creating a way to view the bird photos on demand. To do this I utilized Docker on a third Raspberry Pi by installing Docker and Docker Compose. sudo apt install docker sudo apt install docker-compose Compose is a useful Docker tool that, among other things, allows you to run multi-container applications configured in a YAML file. On Docker Hub a useful photo gallery image linuxserver/photoshow has already been created, so I used that image to serve up the bird photos. At this point, I had already configured an NFS server and made this Pi an NFS client via a shared folder. To create the photo gallery, I first signed into my personal Docker account. I then added two subdirectories to my home directory on the Pi: a config directory, and a thumbs directory. ...

After setting up the NFS server, but before making any NFS clients, I configured another Raspberry Pi to take the photos for my Bird Cam project. For this I used a Raspberry Pi Zero W and the appropriate camera attachment. Instead of using a keyboard/monitor to configure the Zero, I created a headless setup to allow the Zero to connect to wifi automatically when plugged in. First, I put the Raspbian Lite OS on a mini SD card. Once the OS was finished downloading, I removed the card from my computer and inserted it again. On my computer’s terminal I entered the SD card’s boot directory (found with df -h) and created a new file to configure the wifi information for my home network. ...

In this project I wanted to set up a camera to take pictures of pretty birds at a feeder, and then view those photos online. To do so I used three Raspberry Pis, NFS, and Docker. One Raspberry pi served as the NFS server, while the other two were NFS clients. One of the clients was a Raspberry Pi zero w outfitted with a camera to take the pictures and store them on the NFS server. The other client hosted the docker container linuxserver/photoshow that accessed the NFS server to display the photos in a gallery. ...