Meeting & Working with a Docker Captain
At the 2016 DockerCon in Seattle, I went to go see a talk by Alex Ellis about Docker & IoT: protecting the Datacenter. It was a great talk, and since I had been working on IoT devices myself and was impressed, I decided to check out his blog when I got back home.
Because the posts were full of great information about Docker, Raspberry Pi, and many other topics, I starred many of his GitHub projects and started to use Alex’s blog posts to demo projects at the Miami Docker Meetup group.
Alex had just published an excellent blog post on running a time-lapse project with Docker and a Raspberry Pi about the same time I was working on projects for Miami’s first full-blown Maker Faire. That was when Alex asked if I would be interested in building a case using the instructions from his blog post for timelapse video using Docker for Dockercon in Austin. We wanted to use a WD PiDrive BerryBoot Edition 1TB hard drive in the case so we could store as many photos as we wanted without worrying about running out of space. I was excited to be able to contribute to Dockercon.
I thought a shipping container would make the perfect case for everything. Creating the case was a fun experiment of scaling and manipulating the size to keep the PI and drive snug. This would allow me to minimize the hardware used on the case. I also wanted the case to be collapsible so that Alex could easily transport it back to the UK after the event.
Double-sided tape was used on an old laptop hard drive caddy to attach the drive to the bottom of the box. For the Pi, I lasercut a bottom piece and then attached the Pi to the lasercut board with screws, while adding double stick tape to the bottom board. The camera was then attached to a special camera hole made for the PI camera. As a finishing touch I matched the Docker container theme by adding the DockerCon logo.

Some additional special builds I created for DockerCon included a special laser cut badge for Alex’s Pi Workshop and a Raspberry Pi case that holds a Pi Camera. The app I used to create these designs was Adobe illustrator.

At Moonlighter Makerspace I have access to a Full Spectrum Laser PRO 24X36. It takes about twenty minutes to cut the case. Before I moved to cut the pattern out in wood, I cut many renditions out of old cardboard. I spent $5.00 for the craft oak plywood, $30.00 for the Raspberry PI, and the drive was donated by Western Digital. Obviously, without the resources at Moonlighter, this project would have been pretty tough to make.
Much like gym memberships, Moonlighter memberships are flexible and affordable. Starting at $35.00, the entry-level membership gives members up to five hours on various machines as well as unlimited access to tools and space. The memberships range in prices according to the desired services. Pro memberships for avid users like me are available for $150.00 and include ten hours a month for access to:
- CNC
- Full Spectrum Laser PRO 24X36
- Laser and 3D printers
- Vinyl cutters
- Soldering stations
- Industrial sewing machines
- Wood lathes
- PC’s (loaded with all the professional software you could need)
Obviously, having access to these tools/machines/environment is what moves the creative process from an idea to reality, making product creation both affordable and achievable. If had to do this by hand with saws it would be almost impossible. Go support your local Maker and Hacker space.
Here’s a link to all of the files used on this project:
The Laser Cut files
My notes
Stay tuned as Alex and I will be collaborating on future projects around IoT, PI and whatever Alex codes or posts on his blog that I can use to make the next thing. You can follow my future builds on @MarioTheMaker on Instagram or @Mariocruz on Twitter.
Originally published at medium.com on July 10, 2017.
