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Sentry Mode
- Thread starter Chanceofthat
- Start date
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- Tags
- Model 3 Model S Model X Tesla Inc.
Gone. I checked last night and it's no longer available in the Atri drop-down.
voip-ninja
Give me some sugar baby
Yeah far better for them to spend months tweaking the feature while people's cars are being broken into.
From the video Tesla posted of how it works (using Cookie Monster) it appears to light the screen up when it detects someone is approaching the car, presumably it also starts recording at that time. It probably uses the ultrasonic sensors to identify that someone is approaching the vehicle.
The reason you want to alert and start recording at that time is that if someone approaches the vehicle quickly and breaks into it you need as much video you can get of them before they were on top of the car as possible in order to improve the chance of the cops being able to recognize the person.
This is more or less the way that other surveillance recording cameras operate.
Now, you could have a "strict" mode that jettisons this footage if nothing else triggered on the car, such as the microphones or motion detection. However that also means you would not have footage of the person who keyed up your car while you were at work.
israndy
Supercharger Hunter
My solution was to get the SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick so I can access it from my phone anywhere. When I am home it connects to my home wifi so I can access it even while it is still plugged into the car thru my WiFi on my laptop.
Sadly, though it works, when the car wakes up the SanDisk turns off it's WiFi, so you have to press the power button each time you want to access the drive wirelessly. Still super convenient.
-Randy
I decided to just get a OTG usb c to usb 3.1 adapter for cheap to use with any flash drive. Using my phone to delete and transfer files while I am at the car.
Actually it records continuously with 60 minutes buffer just like the dashcam. I sent my son out to the car telling him to look if I left anything inside the car. It shows the video from when he was still inside the house.. and it captured him coming out of the house and walked toward the car before the "start recording screen" showed. It captured him circling the car. You can clearly see his face in every angle.
From what I read in the EV press, Sentry Mode was pushed to the beta test owners ahead of the larger push happening now.
I like that it sounds like it has a built in Parking Mode (this feature was something we looked for when buying a dashcam for our MS a few years ago). I was disappointed that TeslaCam shut down normally when the car was turned off, so Sentry Mode effectively acts as Parking Mode too.
What it sounds like is right now at least there isn't any type of sensitivity setting for triggering the Alert to be activated. Our several hundred dollar Blackvue, has that capability and of course was something you paid for in the price of the product. Not sure if a setting like this is possible on Sentry Mode. If it is I suspect it will be added down the road. As someone who lives in an epidemic area of break ins, I'd rather have false alarms to erase on a USB drive than not. You come back to your car and see no broken window you can obviously just erase any Alert files that were created...unless you want to see what kind of activity was going on around you.
chronopc
Active Member
Does this stick support multiple partitions? I also play music out of my usb drive.
FYI: Turning on sentry mode keeps the 12v socket on. I noticed my blackvue battery b112 fully charged when I got to the car this morning (I also have a b124 hardwired into the 12v socket wires, so Im guessing it kept that charged too). I guess this is good if you wire a dashcam/hotspot to it for redundant security but bad if you have anything else plugged in (lights, electric blankets,etc). I still got about 1 mile drain per hour as with other sentry mode drain tests
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chronopc
Active Member
I think camera motion detection is overkill for a car camera - it will trigger way too often (as it does now). Ultrasonics will trigger only if someone (or something) is right next to the car, which is ideal. Since its buffered, it will still provide you the previous 10 minutes before the event
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voip-ninja
Give me some sugar baby
If that's what they are doing it's pretty stupid. It will make it very hard for owners to zero in and find the video they need. The only reason I can come up with doing it that way is that it would be too expensive from a power budget perspective to use the ultrasonics to trip camera recording.
Again though, if you look at the video Tesla provided, the sentry mode screen comes on before the cookie monster makes contact with the car. If they are using the ultrasonic sensors to do that I don't understand why they aren't using them to trigger activation unless they feel like they will miss something doing it that way.
It is not hard to find the video. When the "HAL" screen came on, it creates a folder for the incident and saved off 10 minutes of it. Each folder has about 30 files (10 front 10 left 10 right 1 min files) and total size is around 1GB. But it does work just like the dashcam except it autosave when it detects incident.
lairdb
Member
Still waiting for my update, but it occurs to me that a command line script (best, e.g. ffmpeg) or micro-utility (okay) that would paste together the snippets timewise, and all three into a single wide format video, would be handy. Bonus points for chyroning any metadata (even if it's just times synced from the filename and framerate.
I believe Tesla requires FAT 32 formatting means that Tesla can not use more than 32 gigs regardless of drive size.
BluestarE3
Active Member
Haven't tried it myself, but I recall reading someone saying that ext4 works as well.
voip-ninja
Give me some sugar baby
Astute catch. If Tesla is forcing FAT32 for the features to work then I don't understand logic of people who have purchased 256GB drives.
You can't format it using the default Windows format tool, but you could use command line to format the drive if you have Windows 10. Or you could download a tool. Lots of people here were using 256GB flash drive for dashcam already.
Found a really annoying bug when using sentry mode this morning. Got back into my car and that big red eye was sitting in the middle of my display. Stayed there even after I started the car and put it in both reverse and forward gears. I had to pull over and do a scroll wheel reboot to get rid of it.
Our Blackvue dashcams use FAT32 formatting and we use a 128GB micro disk in there and run it 24/7. The Blackvue supports micro SD cards up to 128GB according to their manual (from 650S - 900S at least). By saving off separate files for each alert I'm assuming TelsaCam/Sentry Mode gets around that. I wonder what memory capacity the Model 3 will support and take full advantage of.
Believe you meant FAT32 has a 4GB per file limit.
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