Vendor Dashboard for Tesla - the better app for your Tesla

[SG57]

@David99 , it has been discussed a few times now that the ultimate solution in terms of reliability would be to host a service that would perform all vehicle operations for you. There are downsides to this though that have prevented me from migrating over, such as server maintenance and operating costs, but also mainly security is the largest concern. Should anyone infiltrate my server, depending on the sensitive data I am storing every one of your vehicles are at risk. Tesla also faces this same security problem, but I trust they have an entire IT department working to ensure nothing bad happens where as I am my own IT department.

Currently all the network traffic that has anything to do with your account or vehicles is between your device and Tesla's servers. At no point does your account's authorization token, or any vehicle's IDs, go through my servers or anywhere else where you are in the dark as to what I may be doing with it or what security measures are taken. By keeping communication strictly between your device and Tesla, I do not incur operating costs leaving the security up to Tesla, and you can sniff the app's network traffic to see precisely what Is being done, particularly anything nefarious.

As is, I plan to keep communication client-side with a few disclaimers about reliability while constantly aiming to improve reliability. I should have a camper mode fix very soon, I ask you give it a shot again afterwards and see if it doesn't resolve your issue.


@MP3Mike , that's very useful I had no idea. I assumed Tesla would have a standard for their "rated" miles, this could very well skew the power calculation. I'll look into it some more!

 

[David99]

I very much appreciate that you take security seriously. I think it's a valid point, keeping your server secure is not an easy task and nothing you can easily trust a random hosting company with. I'm talking from experience!

If there is anything I can do to help you nail down the timing problems, please let me know. I'm happy to test and document.

 

[Deans]

Yes, $5/month for a car I intend to keep for at least 5 years doesn't make sense. That's $300 vs $10 for the nearest competitor.
It would be hard to convince me this software is 30x better than Remote S.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

On the battery current inaccuracy, that's a tricky one as I don't actually know the unit of that value reported by the car. One would assume it's in kWh, but in my testing it's always roughly 3x that. Because of that, I assume the unit is actually rated-miles-per-hour and the power rate metric I show is a calculation based on that. The power rate is shown inside the gauge/speedo as kWh, and the rated-mph rate is shown immediately to the right of it. Does the battery current rated-mph value shown to you look accurate to you?

Either I'm wrong in thinking the reported value's unit is rated-miles-per-hour, or my power rate calculation is inaccurate (I'm using 325 W per rated mile). Or if you have any ideas what that value actually could be, the raw value returned is the value as displayed by the "#.## per hour" label to the right of current power gauge, so feel free to play with it. Go for a drive and while maintaining 50 kWh power accelerating, refresh the Charge screen and you should see hopefully 50 kWh in the power gauge for example.

Check the charge state API: Tesla Model S JSON API · Apiary

Battery current is in amps (A), negative values mean discharge, positive values mean charge.

Charger voltage is in volts (V), and is the voltage applied to the onboard AC chargers (AC charging) or applied to the battery directly (DC charging).

Charger power is in kilowatts (kW), rounded down to the nearest whole kilowatt.

You can also compute kilowatts using volts * amps, or P (kW) = I (A) * V (V).

Kilowatt-hours (kWh) is a total energy value, and is not returned as part of the charge state API call. You don't need this value for reporting charging.

You can report the rated miles charge rate if you want, but don't use it in calculations since it's dependent on vehicle model and battery size.

 

[n2mb_racing]

Can this app log power (kW) during 0-60 runs, similar to Powertools on iOS?

 

[SG57]

@David99 , thanks I might take you up on that. I've actually finished updating Camper mode so the timing should no longer be an issue.

@Deans , are you referring to the old payment model that was subscription-based? I replaced that with a one-time-payment model last November and no longer offer a subscription service at this time. Let me know if there is any confusion.

@SomeJoe7777 , that unofficial API documentation is outdated, but for the sake of our problem the charge state example is still accurate.

In the charge state response, the field I am reporting is battery_current as it represents the current flowing into the battery at the moment of the data request. If you are driving, parked, or charging it will reflect what your battery is up to which is the whole point of that information display. Useful for example when you turn on your HVAC system and want to see the effect it has on your battery and range.

No other field reports the current battery flow at any given time like this so I have to use this field. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the unit is for this field. As explained above, it can't be power (kWh) as it's always roughly 3x higher than what the actual current power is. This leads me to believe the unit is in rated-miles-per-hour from which I derive the current power from, but as you said rated miles vary between models so this could explain the inaccuracies.

If this is the case, I have no choice but to use the correct rated-mile to power ratio for each model. If this isn't the case, I'd love to know what the unit is for this field. The raw value returned currently is displayed as-is in the "#.# per hour" shown just to the right of the power gauge on the charge screen. Does that make sense? I'm happy to clear anything up.

@n2mb_racing , yes Speed Clocking logs all telemetry data it collects during runs, currently these are: time, speed, distance, power. After a run, the app will also generate a detailed graph plotting data however you'd like in an interactive graph. You can also export the collected telemetry data to CSV for further analysis outside the app.

 

[Deans]

Yes, I was confused. I thought it was still subscription based. Sorry, my mistake.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

@SomeJoe7777 , that unofficial API documentation is outdated, but for the sake of our problem the charge state example is still accurate.

In the charge state response, the field I am reporting is battery_current as it represents the current flowing into the battery at the moment of the data request. If you are driving, parked, or charging it will reflect what your battery is up to which is the whole point of that information display. Useful for example when you turn on your HVAC system and want to see the effect it has on your battery and range.

No other field reports the current battery flow at any given time like this so I have to use this field. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the unit is for this field. As explained above, it can't be power (kWh) as it's always roughly 3x higher than what the actual current power is. This leads me to believe the unit is in rated-miles-per-hour from which I derive the current power from, but as you said rated miles vary between models so this could explain the inaccuracies.

If this is the case, I have no choice but to use the correct rated-mile to power ratio for each model. If this isn't the case, I'd love to know what the unit is for this field. The raw value returned currently is displayed as-is in the "#.# per hour" shown just to the right of the power gauge on the charge screen. Does that make sense? I'm happy to clear anything up.

Battery current is in amps (A). That is the only possible choice for battery current. Nothing else makes sense.

Also, I believe you need to take a closer look at your units throughout. The unit of power is kW, not kWh. kWh is total energy, not power.

 

[SG57]

@SomeJoe7777 , ahh you're right, the unit label is incorrect. I swear I saw kWh as the unit in Tesla's dashboard and blindly trusted that. The app does not use kWh anywhere currently, power is represented as kW.

If the battery_current field is in amps, I've seen values over 300 returned here so is that even feasible? Try it yourself, floor it then immediately refresh the charge screen when your Tesla is outputting 200+ kW power accelerating. Also, I would need the current voltage as well in order to calculate the current power, something not returned through the APIs.

 

[n2mb_racing]

I've also noticed the battery_current field on Teslafi, but the numbers don't make sense. Battery current when floored should be 1500-1600 amps, but I see something like 200-300.

 

[SG57]

@n2mb_racing , instead of amps what if that battery_current field unit was rated-miles-per-hour. Would that 200-300 value you're seeing when flooring it make more sense? That would mean you can deplete your battery by flooring it for an hour.

The simplest answer would be it's in kW and actually represents power. My problem is the values I see are always 3x higher than the actual power. My charger has a power of 7 as returned from the APIs, yet my battery_current shows 20 when charging.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

I had to uninstall your app today. It just constantly keeps issuing the error messages that Tesla's servers are busy. They're not. The standard Tesla app works just fine, as does Visible Tesla, TeslaLog, TeslaFi, etc.

When you fix that issue, I'll give it another try.

 

[beths11]

I had to uninstall your app today. It just constantly keeps issuing the error messages that Tesla's servers are busy. They're not. The standard Tesla app works just fine, as does Visible Tesla, TeslaLog, TeslaFi, etc.

When you fix that issue, I'll give it another try.

Yes Tesla servers were down for over 24hours....Just came back up this am 3/8. My Tesla app was unable to update since the 5th

 

[idealsol]

I had to uninstall your app today. It just constantly keeps issuing the error messages that Tesla's servers are busy. They're not. The standard Tesla app works just fine, as does Visible Tesla, TeslaLog, TeslaFi, etc.

When you fix that issue, I'll give it another try.

I get the same errors daily
And those errors aren't related to yesterday's outage. I have been getting those errors long before that outage
Not a deal breaker for me but a bit annoying

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Yes Tesla servers were down for over 24hours....Just came back up this am 3/8. My Tesla app was unable to update since the 5th

Like idealsol said, I've been getting these daily for weeks for several hours at a time. I'm just tired of my notification bar being constantly full of errors.

 

[SG57]

@SomeJoe7777 & @idealsol , there were serious problems with Tesla's servers yesterday, and all last week leading up to yesterday, for everyone. These errors were on Tesla's server side, and if you have Smart Charging enabled then every time smart charging polled it would fail due to their server problems.

This has less to do with me than it has to do with Tesla's servers being uncharacteristically down/unusable, but I'm happy to implement a better means of presenting these errors so as not to annoy you but still be able to alert you that the service is not functioning with a reason. Right now service errors are compiled into a single notification with a timestamp for each background service. I can put these errors in the app then add an option to show/hide service error notifications, but if you aren't showing error notifications and things didn't work you'd have to open the app and check if an error occurred that could be the cause.

Right now turning off smart charging when the servers are down will stop the service error notifications, and you can do this right from the service error notification itself clicking the action button labelled "Turn Off Smart Charging". You would then have to turn it back on once Tesla's servers are working again.

All other background services are also affected by this, but less annoying because of their once-daily frequency (plug-in reminder), or their specific circumstance (Camper mode, cabin temp. protection).

You may still get the occasional server error but again that's on Tesla's side, on my side I can do better with handling them.

 

[supratachophobia]

I had to uninstall your app today. It just constantly keeps issuing the error messages that Tesla's servers are busy. They're not. The standard Tesla app works just fine, as does Visible Tesla, TeslaLog, TeslaFi, etc.

When you fix that issue, I'll give it another try.

It's not his fault. You are running the stock app along side and the double requests are what's causing the errors.

Edit: "usually". Yesterday was a freak problem with Tesla servers on their end.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

It's not his fault. You are running the stock app along side and the double requests are what's causing the errors.

But doesn't everyone do this? You can't sync contacts and calendar if Tesla's native app isn't running.

 

[SG57]

@SomeJoe7777 , in my testing you do not need the official app installed or even internet connection to sync contacts with your vehicle, that is done over Bluetooth and as well it should right since what good are contacts if your phone isn't connected to call them.

Currently you do need the official app installed in order to sync calendar events, and that is done using known APIs so technically I can add support for that within the app, maybe even abuse it to do some cool stuff @supratachophobia described way early on with trip routing. The one thing I cannot feasibly support that the official app will always have over others is the push-notifications for things like summon start/stop, charge start, firmware update, etc.

Regardless, I've finished adding 2 new settings: 1 to toggle off service error notifications (you'll get a toast instead), and the other to view past service errors recorded.

I'm finishing up testing new camper mode changes, a new days-of-week setting for plug-in reminder, and a new "Start HVAC near completion" setting for Smart Charging. Once I'm satisfied with this and unless something urgent comes up I plan to start the next big thing - Automatic Behaviors.

 

[David99]

Despite the small issues I just wanted to say I really love your app and I very much appreciate the effort you put in!