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No sentry events since 2020.12.5

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Ever since I updated to 2020.12.5 I have not received any sentry alerts in the car. The only thing that shows in the cars viewer is dash cam videos. I used to get a lot of sentry event notifications when I got in the car, not seeing anything for a while.

many one else seeing this? I toggled sentry mode off and back on. I am not excluding home, work, or favorites.
 
Same thing happened to me.

drove to park and physically saw people riding bikes next to my car in the bike lane (FYI, idc).

Got in and there were no events recorded, which is weird because I’d have like 10 of people walking by on the sidewalk before. Haven’t had a chance to mess with it though.
 
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Ensure the storage is formatted with FAT32 and not exFAT or ext4.

yeah, I haven’t touched the the SSD. Same set up that was working before the latest update. It definitely works to an extent. If I save a video by selecting the camera icon, and launch viewer, that video is there. Recent clips also show up if I take the SSD out and look on the computer. No sentry events in the folder
 
Park your car, lock it and check your phone app to verify Sentry Mode is on. Leave your phone out of range of the car (or turn off BT), wait a couple of minutes, and then walk around your parked car closely, peer through the windows and tug at the door handle. Does the "sunburst" (HAL replacement) appear on your touchscreen along with the message that Sentry Mode is recording?

Sentry Mode should work regardless of how your drive is formatted or even if there's no drive inserted (you just won't have any Sentry recordings). However, if you don't even see the on-screen warning when you get up close and personal with the car, then there's an issue with Sentry Mode itself.
 
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Park your car, lock it and check your phone app to verify Sentry Mode is on. Leave your phone out of range of the car (or turn off BT), wait a couple of minutes, and then walk around your parked car closely, peer through the windows and tug at the door handle. Does the "sunburst" (HAL replacement) appear on your touchscreen along with the message that Sentry Mode is recording?

Sentry Mode should work regardless of how your drive is formatted or even if there's no drive inserted (you just won't have any Sentry recordings). However, if you don't even see the on-screen warning when you get up close and personal with the car, then there's an issue with Sentry Mode itself.

so I did try toggling sentry mode off on in the app. It was on, bu to tried it anyways. Did notice one sentry event, so I need to test it more. I didn’t get me walking around or doing anything around the car, just a car driving by. Will have to watch it, but some progress....
 
I did have the phone with me. All of the times I tried after exiting, I had a waited a bit.

I will test without the phone. Never had issues in the past as it always recorded me walking up after work when I had the phone, but who knows, I will try a couple more things.
 
Depending on how I approach my car, it may or may not trigger a Sentry alert event. Mostly, it doesn't. My guess is that if the car recognizes the presence of my phone before I get too close to it, then no alert is triggered. Conversely, if my phone isn't detected until after I get too close to the car, then it'll have triggered an event before then recognizing me as its rightful owner. I haven't been out much since shelter-at-home, so I don't know if the behavior or "sensitivity" has changed with 2020.12.5.

However, if Sentry is triggered by other people/objects getting close to your car and it's saving clips of these events in the SentryClips folder, then it's doing its job as intended. For your peace of mind, I suggest testing it by approaching your car yourself (without your phone) and seeing if the fullscreen "sunburst" is triggered. After getting back into your car, verify the on-screen notification pop-up indicates the alert event and that dashcam viewer shows the event you intentionally triggered.
 
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Depending on how I approach my car, it may or may not trigger a Sentry alert event. Mostly, it doesn't. My guess is that if the car recognizes the presence of my phone before I get too close to it, then no alert is triggered. Conversely, if my phone isn't detected until after I get too close to the car, then it'll have triggered an event before then recognizing me as its rightful owner. I haven't been out much since shelter-at-home, so I don't know if the behavior or "sensitivity" has changed with 2020.12.5.

However, if Sentry is triggered by other people/objects getting close to your car and it's saving clips of these events in the SentryClips folder, then it's doing its job as intended. For your peace of mind, I suggest testing it by approaching your car yourself (without your phone) and seeing if the fullscreen "sunburst" is triggered. After getting back into your car, verify the on-screen notification pop-up indicates the alert event and that dashcam viewer shows the event you intentionally triggered.

left the phone in the house, and no triggered event walking around the car. It used to flash the headlights as I approached. I did try to the door handle and it did set it off. I had scheduled a service appointment to see if there is anything they could see without having to come out, and they actually replied via text and let me know there are known issues with sentry since 2020.12.5 and they should be addressed in the next update.
 
I have the same problem. No sentry triggering at home by me in testing nor while parked in busy parking lots, in a couple of months. Worked for previous 10 months (including a hit and run). Also, in last couple of months battery drain when sentry is on has been negligible/nil, rather than noticeable as it always used to be. Also, I can't trigger the sunburst.
The screen in the M3 LR HW3 shows the sunburst icon ; my phone says sentry is on, etc
Very concerning. If there really is a known bug, I would like to have been told how to mitigate the problem.

I removed my raspberry pi (which used to send all videos to a remote server, and sync my music folder) and put in the USB stick I used to use, with no problem. Tesla at first refused to format it ("too many partitions") so I deleted my music partition, let Tesla format it, and this makes no difference; sentry still not working.
 
Yup, This is indeed a case of Tesla knowing about a bug and not bothering to notify owners who may be subject to it. I have spent a bunch of my own time making sure I'd done nothing wrong, now followed by schduling a half-day for Tesla to visit, then replaced by several phone calls with their remote diagnosis team (cool), all to be told that yes indeed tihs is a known bug which will be fixed in an upcoming 2020.20 update (no time frame available).

Remote diagnosis is awesome. Phone support is awesome (though it is amusing that this technician didn't even know about the updated feature which formats your USB for you).

Witholding information from owners that is costless to share is not cool. If there were 10,000 cars affected, and each owner spent an extra 2 hours searching online, fiddling with their USB, etc to try to fix it, it's already a million dollars of externalized costs just due to not sharing what they know with the people who need to know it, and who trust them.
If instead it's 4 hours each, and some of those cars get vandalized or damaged and are missing the Sentry they were relying on, the costs of silence are greater.

There's nothing I love less than people with information that only they have, that is free to disseminate, and that is highly valuable to others choosing to withhold it.

[also posted on tesla forums]