Preventing 1h rollover buffer for dashcam

[ZeeDoktor]

The manual says dashcam footage is overwritten with a rolling buffer of 1h length. For those of us living in parts of the world where traffic rules are enforced with cameras this seems inadequate. A week or so after an alleged traffic offence, the fine arrives in the mail, and more often than not I have found myself questioning the evidence at hand, so it would be quite useful to be able to go back to the time of the alleged infringement and have some evidence at hand from the car's own dashcam.

Has anyone come across a solution to extend the length of the buffer to a couple of weeks time? Shouldn't be an issue with e.g. a 2TB USB SSD, assuming one drives 2h a day on average that's only about 500GB of footage to store. There's even SD cards of 512GB capacity that would do the job.

If the retention period cannot be set in the car itself, has anyone looked into solutions that involve mounting a USB drive in a shared mode, if that's even possible, and have a job evacuate the data from the TeslaCam directory before it gets overwritten?

 

[PhilDavid]

I would love to know how to create a time lapse of a long drive of say 3 hours. Any way to get that long video from TeslaCam?

 

[tranzndance]

Was it obvious when a traffic camera caught an alleged infraction or were you surprised to get the fine in the mail? If the latter, you could have the Tesla record that moment and it wouldn't be overwritten.

 

[jmaddr]

This is more involved than you are asking, but some have created a raspberry pi server to mount in the car that copies all the dashcam files. Raspberry pi's are not hard at all to program if you have just a little programming experience but can be intimidating if not.

I'm sure you could change the code to keep it simple and just write to the local pi storage and not have it upload to a home server if you had a big enough USB storage in the pi. That would certainly keep it simpler.
marcone/teslausb

 

[ZeeDoktor]

@tranzndance it's not always obvious. Here's a good example: Some years ago I was driving through the cross city tunnel in Sydney, upon entering the speed limit signs showed 40km/h for no obvious reason (no roadwork, or service vehicles in tunnel etc). That speed really is a crawl when you can see over a km ahead (1km = 1m30s of driving at 40km/h!) and there's no obstacles visible and no other traffic ahead. At the point where I started to get passed by other traffic doing the normal 80km/h limit I sped up to 60km/h, assuming this obviously is a signalling malfunction. Sure enough a week later I received a letter with a speeding fine for having done 55km/h in the temporary 40km/h zone. I contested this based on the argument it must have been a malfunction and that I was in fact putting myself and others at risk by doing the speed limit and being passed by other vehicles doing the otherwise legal limit of twice my speed, and the complaints department recommended I take it to court, should I have any evidence such as from a dash cam. I didn't have that evidence, so I made a calculation and decided to take the fine (and the point on the license, which raised my insurance premium by a couple of hundred dollars a year for the next 3 years) rather than spending a couple of grand on a lawyer and court fees only to lose for lack of evidence on my side - and then still pay the increased premium.

Now had I had a recording from the week prior I could have saved those files when I got the fine in the mail and descended on the traffic authorities in court with evidence and the fury of an angry walrus!

@jmaddr The car requires a USB stick/drive to store the files, meaning the drive it's being stored to must be a USB2 compatible USB device. Raspberries Pi's don't have a device controller mode, they only have USB host mode, you can't plug a Pi into a USB socket and use its SD card as storage. However, Raspberry Zero does - so there's potentially a way to do this. But from what I've read online it's not evident whether it's possible to simultaneously access an SD card FAT32 partition from the Zero as it is being written to by the Tesla. If the Zero runs at the same time and has access to the files, it's a simple scripting job of mirroring the data from the FAT32 partition over to a much larger storage partition where the last however many hours of video can be saved. Just trying to find out at this stage if anyone else has already put the legwork in to make this work. If not, I'm happy to have a crack at it.

 

[Dithermaster]

Just trying to find out at this stage if anyone else has already put the legwork in to make this work. If not, I'm happy to have a crack at it.

It's already done. @jmaddr gave you a link to the implementation: marcone/teslausb

 

[ZeeDoktor]

missed that link, thank you!

 

[BubbleButt]

This is more involved than you are asking, but some have created a raspberry pi server to mount in the car that copies all the dashcam files. Raspberry pi's are not hard at all to program if you have just a little programming experience but can be intimidating if not.

I'm sure you could change the code to keep it simple and just write to the local pi storage and not have it upload to a home server if you had a big enough USB storage in the pi. That would certainly keep it simpler.
marcone/teslausb

A Tesla owner has created this device and is selling them preprogrammed and ready to buy:
www.tryroadie.com
I haven't tried this yet but I did find it on YouTube.com. It has a built in WiFi so you can download an app for your mobile device and play back dash cam footage from your car without removing the device from your Tesla.

 

[MrKool]

roadie is what I want this is awesome I been looking for a solution like this. too bad it is sold out already I guess xmas will come late for me

 

[MrKool]

It's already done. @jmaddr gave you a link to the implementation: marcone/teslausb

So this is what roadie is in a nut shell? As roadie is not available I can make this does any one know if this works in a model S which has less powerfull USB ports?

 

[BubbleButt]

I've ordered mine before Christmas but it is still 3 weeks out.