Vendor Dashboard for Tesla - the better app for your Tesla

[Andyw2100]

I have a suggestion for an addition to the smart charging options.

My wife (and I assume others as well) leave for work at a different time every day. So each day I modify the smart charging completion time, based on what time she tells me she is leaving in the morning. My suggestion would be an optional switch to disable smart charging once the charge completes.

I could be mistaken about this, but I believe my phone is using more battery power when smart charging is enabled than when it is disabled. That's fine, for when I actually need smart charging enabled. But in my case, and I expect other people's cases as well, once the charge has completed, we don't need smart charging enabled for the majority of the day. An option to simply disable it each time charging completes would help with this.

What do you think?

 

[SG57]

@Andyw2100 , currently you can have multiple smart charging locations that share the same location but with different configurations (say one for completion at 6 am, the other at 9 am). You can then enable/disable the locations to achieve whichever behavior you're after. Would that solve your dilemma? If not, could you explain better what setting you'd like to see added? Like a checkbox setting "Disable location on session end" that disables that very smart charging location when the smart charging session ends via it starts then either completes or is unplugged.

To your second point, with a smart charging location enabled, every 15 minutes your device will check-in on your vehicle to determine if smart charging processes need to occur. This polling causes an inherent battery drain on your device, but relatively speaking it's so infrequent and the network usage used to ping the vehicle is measured in mere bytes so it's never escalated to the point of concern with me.

If you can, check your Battery settings on your device and see which apps are causing the most battery drain at the end of the day. Let me know if Dashboard for Tesla makes it on that list. On Android 6.0+ and up with doze mode (battery optimizations) I can confirm for the past few months this app is non-existent (<1%) on impacting battery life with smart charging enabled.

To your point though, to implement your request let's say you've completed a charge. I could simply delay polling for 12 hours for that entire vehicle banking on the fact you won't drain your battery, plug back in and want a smart charge completed within 12 hours. It'd likely not affect most people as they use the typical nightly usage of the feature. However, this starts to break when multiple smart charging locations are enabled. I know of some users who have atypical setups that like to charge at home by 9 am and at work by 5 pm, so if I delayed smart charge polling for 12 hours after completing at home at 9 am then the next poll time is 9 pm thus preventing their work charging location by 5 pm from functioning. And I can't delay polling only for that home location when there are multiple locations as I need to know the location of the vehicle to determine whether to process the other locations.

I struggled to come up with a good solution to this, ultimately the safest and easiest method was to account for every possible setup by pinging the vehicle every 15 minutes and eat that battery drain (although miniscule).

There might be a middle-ground somewhere though now that I think about it... How does this sound, process this solution thoroughly and tell me if you can break it? We delay smart charging polling by 12 hours for that entire vehicle on smart charge session end* ONLY IF all your enabled smart charging locations share the same location. Adding/editing/enabling smart charge locations for that vehicle from within the app at anytime will revert polling back to 15 minutes.

* where session end means charging started, then charge completed, or the vehicle was unplugged before completion

 

[SG57]

@scottf200 , it's funny you mention 24 hour logging of smart charging because that's actually already implemented but it's only available in the beta builds of the app. It's exactly what we used to beta test smart charging and make sure we liked what we were seeing enough to release it.

So by the looks of your issue, your charge limit was set to 80% but your current state of charge was 81%? That's an interesting case I haven't considered. Based on the current smart charging logic, it will start then immediately stop as you witnessed so that shouldn't be too bad right now. I'll put in some protection around this strange case though, let me know if I missed something or you experience other issues. Sorry about this.

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Small update on automatic behaviors development, it's very close to being complete and ready for beta testing. You guys are gonna love it!

 

[Andyw2100]

@Andyw2100 , currently you can have multiple smart charging locations that share the same location but with different configurations (say one for completion at 6 am, the other at 9 am). You can then enable/disable the locations to achieve whichever behavior you're after. Would that solve your dilemma?

I'm aware of the multiple smart charging locations sharing the same actual location possibility. It's just simpler for me to edit the time, than to create 20 or 30 smart charging locations and then have to pick one. Changing the time is pretty quick and simple.

If not, could you explain better what setting you'd like to see added? Like a checkbox setting "Disable location on session end" that disables that very smart charging location when the smart charging session ends via it starts then either completes or is unplugged.

Exactly. That is all it would take.

To your second point, with a smart charging location enabled, every 15 minutes your device will check-in on your vehicle to determine if smart charging processes need to occur. This polling causes an inherent battery drain on your device, but relatively speaking it's so infrequent and the network usage used to ping the vehicle is measured in mere bytes so it's never escalated to the point of concern with me.

It is anecdotal and somewhat subjective, but it just seems that ever since I prevented the Android OS from being able to quit or pause or whatever it would do to your program to sav power, my battery is not lasting nearly as long as it used to. I don't know if not having Smart Charging active would help with this or not, Optimally once the Smart Charging session ended, your software would not draw any power at all until I either start it to manage the car in some way, or until I enable a smart charging session again. I realize, though, that this may not be possible.

If you can, check your Battery settings on your device and see which apps are causing the most battery drain at the end of the day. Let me know if Dashboard for Tesla makes it on that list. On Android 6.0+ and up with doze mode (battery optimizations) I can confirm for the past few months this app is non-existent (<1%) on impacting battery life with smart charging enabled.

I'm not sure what you mean about doze mode.

I did just check my recent battery usage, and Dashboard For Tesla is not on the list. That being said, I still have the anecdotal, subjective feeling that my battery is draining faster than it used to.

To your point though, to implement your request let's say you've completed a charge. I could simply delay polling for 12 hours for that entire vehicle banking on the fact you won't drain your battery, plug back in and want a smart charge completed within 12 hours. It'd likely not affect most people as they use the typical nightly usage of the feature. However, this starts to break when multiple smart charging locations are enabled. I know of some users who have atypical setups that like to charge at home by 9 am and at work by 5 pm, so if I delayed smart charge polling for 12 hours after completing at home at 9 am then the next poll time is 9 pm thus preventing their work charging location by 5 pm from functioning. And I can't delay polling only for that home location when there are multiple locations as I need to know the location of the vehicle to determine whether to process the other locations.

I struggled to come up with a good solution to this, ultimately the safest and easiest method was to account for every possible setup by pinging the vehicle every 15 minutes and eat that battery drain (although miniscule).

There might be a middle-ground somewhere though now that I think about it... How does this sound, process this solution thoroughly and tell me if you can break it? We delay smart charging polling by 12 hours for that entire vehicle on smart charge session end* ONLY IF all your enabled smart charging locations share the same location. Adding/editing/enabling smart charge locations for that vehicle from within the app at anytime will revert polling back to 15 minutes.

I think you are seriously overthinking this. I don't think there is any reason to change the basic implementation of smart charging, polling, etc., for people who are happy with how things are now. The checkbox I'm suggesting would simply allow those of us that want to disable smart charging at completion to do so, and would have no affect on anyone else.

 

[St Charles]

I'd love to be able to set SoC as part of smart charging.

 

[hiroshiy]

Speaking of vampire drain, TeslaFi polls cars without waking the car up. Would it be possible for Dashboard to poll like this? If the car is asleep and the app has location info from the previous polling, then it will be safe to assume that the car is very close to previous known location, as Tesla cars take up to 15 minutes to sleep.

 

[scottf200]

I'd love to be able to set SoC as part of smart charging.

This is something that I brought up upstream and SG57 indicated he thought it was useful to others and would implement it.

Here is the link to that exchange: Vendor - Dashboard for Tesla - the better app for your Tesla

 

[SG57]

@Andyw2100 , the large overthought process was in response to how to reduce the polling frequency to help curb your device's battery drain you're feeling. If the app is not in the battery list then odds are the app is not the cause of your battery drain or else Android's battery usage monitoring is horribly inaccurate. Doze mode is also known as Battery Optimizations and was added in Android 6.0 restricting network access to apps when the device is asleep. And okay, the new setting to turn off the smart charging location on session end is simple to add and adds value, I'll do it now real quick.

@St Charles & @scottf200 , already done and tested as of last week. It'll go out with the big automatic behaviors update here soon. Thanks for the suggestion!

@hiroshiy , you may be on to something here, that's a very good point. You can check the status of the car without waking it up, so unless your vehicle falls asleep on a moving platform (?) then it's safe to assume your vehicle's location is the same as the previous one. This means smart charging will let the vehicle sleep if it is already asleep and not at a smart charging location. Question is, if I poll every 15 minutes will the vehicle ever sleep in the first place? Or should I delay polling by 1 minute to give the chance for the vehicle to sleep.

 

[scottf200]

@St Charles & @scottf200 , already done and tested as of last week. It'll go out with the big automatic behaviors update here soon. Thanks for the suggestion!

@SG57 , Excellent. Looking forward to this. I woke up Monday morning with a 100% charge because I changed my Smart Charging option back to my normal one (80%) from my travel (100%)one but forgot to manually update set the SOC to 80%! Ugh ... but wont have to worry much longer.

Hopefully when you press 'STD' in the example you provided it brings you to your normal interface where I can select 80%.

 

[SG57]

@scottf200 , of course, that's exactly how it's implemented. It would've taken me longer to not reuse the existing set charge limit dialog.

 

[hiroshiy]

@Andyw2100 , the large overthought process was in response to how to reduce the polling frequency to help curb your device's battery drain you're feeling. If the app is not in the battery list then odds are the app is not the cause of your battery drain or else Android's battery usage monitoring is horribly inaccurate. Doze mode is also known as Battery Optimizations and was added in Android 6.0 restricting network access to apps when the device is asleep. And okay, the new setting to turn off the smart charging location on session end is simple to add and adds value, I'll do it now real quick.

@St Charles & @scottf200 , already done and tested as of last week. It'll go out with the big automatic behaviors update here soon. Thanks for the suggestion!

@hiroshiy , you may be on to something here, that's a very good point. You can check the status of the car without waking it up, so unless your vehicle falls asleep on a moving platform (?) then it's safe to assume your vehicle's location is the same as the previous one. This means smart charging will let the vehicle sleep if it is already asleep and not at a smart charging location. Question is, if I poll every 15 minutes will the vehicle ever sleep in the first place? Or should I delay polling by 1 minute to give the chance for the vehicle to sleep.

What TeslaFi seems to do is monitor battery current, and if it goes zero, stop polling for at least 15 minutes to let the car sleep. Then check the status again. You might want to check out TeslaFi thread.

In my gut feeling vampire drain is bigger in my case than the power saved by advanced preconditioning and timed charging that finishes right before the drive.

 

[baxster]

I apologize in advance if this was posted - I searched as many ways as I could think of but didn't read through all pages.

I love the app, and paid for all extensions with the exception of the speed analyzer.

I have a feature suggestion for smart charging. My local power company has a package where power is cheapest between 6pm and 3pm and the SUPER expensive between 3pm-6pm. I would simply like to plug my car in when I get home and be able to have the location setting be that I want the "Only Charge from 6pm to 3pm" option. In the current app I have to also put in a "Complete charging by" time, which delays the start of my charge.

For example, right now I have Complete charging by 2:45pm (to give me a 15 min buffer before expensive time). But if I plug my car in at 7pm my car won't even start charging until around 1pm the next day.

Making the Complete Charging By an additional checkbox would solve this for me.

I have owned a few very successful programming companies over the years, I completely appreciate if this cannot be done and applaud the work you have put into the app. Pricing to satisfy customers and your business requirements is a challenge, I am very happy with what I paid for the app and hope your efforts are properly compensated.

 

[SG57]

Hey all,

Good news, Automatic Behaviors is here!

An update for Dashboard for Tesla is now available (1.19.0) sporting some hefty new features, quality of life improvements, and bug fixes.

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Automatic Behaviors

A new Advanced Controls feature, you may now schedule vehicle commands to be sent automatically based on conditions you set for yourself.

You can automatically do things like start the HVAC per your Monday-Friday work schedule, or start and stop charging exactly when you want, or close the sun roof, lock the car and set the charge limit every night, or honk the horn every 15 minutes to be annoying.

Automatic behaviors are composed of automatic actions that execute linearly based on your set conditions.
Currently, only 1 condition is supported - Time. This can either be an interval or an exact time and on which days of the week.

I plan to add more conditions in the future, such as vehicle status and weather. For example, this will allow you to automatically check the weather every 30 minutes for precipitation in which case close the sun roof, or automatically stop charging when past a certain state-of-charge.

Currently, there are 2 automatic actions supported - Vehicle Command & Delay.

The Delay action simply causes the automatic behavior to delay execution before continuing on to the next automatic action. So if you want to honk the horn 5 times with 5 seconds in between each honk, go nuts.

The Vehicle Command action can be any of the following supported commands:

• Start HVAC
• Stop HVAC
• Set Temperature
• Flash Lights
• Honk Horn
• Lock Doors
• Unlock Doors
• Sun Roof Control
• Set Charge Limit
• Start Charging
• Stop Charging
• Open Charge Port Door
• Close Charge Port Door

You may also instruct a vehicle command to wait for completion such that the automatic behavior will delay execution until the vehicle command successfully completes (indicated by the red stop sign adjacent to an automatic action)

There are endless ways to configure your automatic behaviors, I look forward to hearing some of your most useful setups.

Requires your device to stay powered on, and requires both your Tesla and your device to maintain internet connection.

-

Smart Charging Upgrades

Smart Charging got some love the past few weeks as well functionally and aesthetically. The visual upgrades are self-explanatory.

Here are the functional upgrades:

• Added "Days of week" option
  You may now specify which days of the week this smart charging location will be active on. This allows you to have multiple smart charging setups for the same location without conflict (think Weekdays vs Weekends).
  
  
• Added "Set charge limit" option
  When enabled, this smart charging location will now set the charge limit to your desired amount when the session is active.
  
  
• Added "Disable location on session end" option
  When enabled, this smart charging location will now disable itself on session end - this includes charge completion or interruption (unplugged, stopped, etc.).

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Other Changes

• "Summon & HomeLink" feature package has been renamed to "Advanced Controls" and includes the new Automatic Behaviors. You do not need to purchase "Advanced Controls" if you had already purchased "Summon & HomeLink"
• Added "Check For Update" feature
  
• UI received some love in various places
• Added disabling of extra, active smart charging locations that share the same location
• Added Tip-related settings for showing tips and resetting shown tips
• Added battery optimizations warning notification setting, when disabled will show a short toast instead
• Lot o' bug fixes (read: edge-case fixes)
• More misc. improvements

-

Next Big Thing

Android Wear Support

Unfortunately I don't own an Android wear device, but I am still able to support it in the meantime albeit more slowly. That being said, if anybody is selling an old/used wear device I can use to speed up development, let's talk!

-

Thanks again to @agw and @supratachophobia for helping beta test and pointing out all the room for improvement.

And thank all of you for your support and patience, please report any issues you have either on here or via email. I'll be monitoring both channels closely per usual.

Use this full access code valid Thursday-only (I'll update for Friday tomorrow) to try out everything the app has to offer on your real vehicle completely free: 3459
To enter an access code, press-and-hold the sign-in button for 3 seconds.


Cheers!

 

[MMC-]

Hi,
Like what I see on the new update but I noticed something today that might have been in prior release also. Charging at a dc fast charger (CHAdeMO) the charging screen shows I'm Supercharging. Tesla app just shows charging. Not a big deal but I thought I'd bring it to your attention.

Thanks,

 

[SG57]

@MMC- , ah okay, good catch! Being in eastern WA I personally have never been to a supercharger to see the API response myself, luckily I've found some responses online so I've got all I need to fix that, I'll get on it now. Thanks for reporting!

@hiroshiy , interesting idea. The only way I can think of to monitor the battery current other than querying the charge state (which wakes the vehicle up) is to connect to the telemetry streaming service checking the power. I do not know if this act of connecting to the telemetry stream wakes the vehicle up however.

If it doesn't, that's good news as it also reports on the location of the vehicle, something I currently get from the vehicle state data request which is ultimately what is waking the vehicle up preventing it from sleeping. If I switched over to using the telemetry service to get the location, it would inherently let the vehicle sleep when not at a smart charging location. I'll do some testing tonight, I like where this is going.

@baxster , thanks for your support and kind words! This app is still a side-project of mine as I'm also employed at the moment, but I'm very passionate about this and hopefully it shows.

Per your smart charging request, let's see if I understood that correctly. You don't particularly care when charging completes, you only really care when charging shouldn't occur. Currently, you can achieve this "charging shouldn't occur" behavior with the time restrictions option by restricting charging from 6 pm to 3 pm. But, you currently must provide a completion time, this doesn't work out so well given the 2 pm and 7 pm scenario you posed.

Adding support for this can be done relatively easily and quickly, and I can see the value it adds. The new setting would turn the current completion time requirement into an optional setting. When enabled, you get the current behavior. When disabled, I believe it's a safe assumption (correct me if I'm wrong here) that charging should always attempt to start, respecting your time restrictions if enabled. So if you plug-in at 2 pm, it'll charge for an hour before stopping at 3 pm only to later resume charging at 6 pm.

I'll add it to the list, great idea!

 

[scottf200]

@SG57, thanks for adding the SOC setting to the Smart Charging. That will be very useful. I currently don't see anything in the automatic behaviors that I need but I purchased it anyway to show my support. App is great. I have promoted it on other sites.

When I am Supercharging the AMPs show up as 72. That number is the max that my Sig X can charge on AC. It does not have anything to do with DC Supercharging. I'm pretty sure the native Tesla app shows both AMPs and Voltage correctly (or they may have recently removed it?). I was assuming it was still in the API tho.[/QUOTE]

Doesn't look like you are that far from a supercharger in ID <grin>

 

[SG57]

@scottf200 , sneaky devil. That supercharger is 45 minutes away unfortunately, and I've only ever driven by that supercharger once at 1 a.m. with a sleeping female in the passenger seat. Truth be told, I was seriously tempted to stop to do some testing to collect some data in the dark, but hell hath no fury like a woman's scorn and I chickened out..

Thank you for your support! It means a lot to hear such positive remarks, I think the Tesla brand just naturally attracts good-spirited people.

I'm happy to fix the oddities around fast/super/regular charging metrics displayed, I just need some accurate API readings for each case. I plan to head out to a supercharger soon-ish with a laptop and do some work on it remotely.

I've recently learned the newest 8.1 firmware has removed the battery_current field from the charge state API, this sucks as the only other available data on the current charge is from the telemetry streaming API that returns the current power rounded to a whole integer. Sad day when Tesla continues to reduce the capabilities of their own APIs arbitrarily.

 

[baxster]

@SG57 you understood my charging example perfectly! Toggle end time for charge location so charge will occur anytime between set start and end.

Great work!

 

[scottf200]

@SG57 , FYI I received this in my phone notification today. Not sure if anyone else is reporting it. Only thing changed recently is the new release and me setting my daily Smart Charging option to set SOC to 80%. (complete by 5am 7 day/wk, allow charge stopping, only charge from 21 to 05)

 

[scottf200]

If I understand correctly the Dashboard for Tesla 'Smart Charging' option (SMo) 'Allow charge stopping' would be what is doing the red arrows. To avoid short charging before Dashboard for Tesla stops them, then I should turn on the built-in Tesla car option of start charging at 5:15am? Theoretically, the built-in charging at 5:15am would never happen since it should be charged already up to my set SOC.

Note below that my Smart Charging option is set to 80% and to end by 5am (SMo range is set to 21:00-05:00)

[update] In thinking about the above, I may just want to live with those short charges until DfT stops the charges because I have other Smart Charging options that end at 8am for 100% SOC trips. The above tip could be useful by others if they only use one Smart Charging option [/update]