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Sentry Mode

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Interesting information. I guess the ultimate question is 'Has anyone benefited from Sentry Mode? As in, has it deterred a potential vandal.' Not, the here is my test video.

thats impossible to know.

If someone heard about sentry mode and decided to break into a different car because of it then it deterred a vandal but the tesla owner would never be aware of it.
 
I doubt even 10% of people have the new update. It could be that Tesla is rolling it out slowly, will make some improvements based on customer feedback (false activations of Sentry Mode spring to mind) and then most customers will ultimately receive a later release with the feature in a more polished state.

Thanks! Sometimes when you get on these forums you feel like EVERYONE has it and you were forgotten. I'd much prefer the buffed-out version. I will wait patiently. :)
 
But doesn't the car itself show that an update is ready to download and install? I vaguely recall this from the last update. I'm just wondering if there's a way to see if the car was trying to receive the update but couldn't due to WiFi issues.

No the car doesn't display anything until after the update has been downloaded, unpacked, and verified.
 
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Can someone explain why some people have the updated app and sentry mode and I don't. The app store has nothing to do with when Tesla sends out updates to each vehicle. My app is updated... no sentry to my car or the app. Booo!

The app won't display features that your car does not yet support. (What would the point be to showing you a feature to turn on that wouldn't actually work?)
 
If interested in using Siri to enable/disable the Sentry mode, I just added this feature to the Stats app.


Simulator Screen Shot - iPhone XS Max - 2019-02-25 at 16.54.15.PNG
 
I ran a test yesterday parked at work in gloomy Socal. I enabled sentry mode at 37% (114.1 mi). I checked on it a little over 8 hours later and it was down to 34% (105.92 mi). Total loss of 8.18 miles (~1mi/hr). Not too bad for the potential benefits.
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So I've been using Sentry Mode every time I park at work for over a week now. I've got a 256GB flash drive plugged in and it's been recording fine with no problems as far as I can tell. I plan on plugging the flash drive into my laptop after work today to see how much space is being used up.
 
Finally got around to plugging in my flash drive to my laptop for the first time since getting Sentry Mode a little over a week ago. Between the recent files folder and the saved clips folder it was using a little over 150GB of the 256GB flash drive. This is with enabling Sentry Mode at work for at least 8 hours every weekday all last week as well as yesterday and today for this week.

Tesla clearly needs to come up with some solution to clear out the oldest Sentry Mode saved files. I’m thinking any files over a week old should be deleted automatically provided that you’ve entered and exited the car at least a handful of times since the oldest recording. I would expect anyone to notice damage to their car within a few days of it occurring so a week seems plenty long enough to me. If I need to get into a habit of removing the flash drive once a week to clear out old files manually this is going to get old real fast...
 
Finally got around to plugging in my flash drive to my laptop for the first time since getting Sentry Mode a little over a week ago. Between the recent files folder and the saved clips folder it was using a little over 150GB of the 256GB flash drive. This is with enabling Sentry Mode at work for at least 8 hours every weekday all last week as well as yesterday and today for this week.

Tesla clearly needs to come up with some solution to clear out the oldest Sentry Mode saved files. I’m thinking any files over a week old should be deleted automatically provided that you’ve entered and exited the car at least a handful of times since the oldest recording. I would expect anyone to notice damage to their car within a few days of it occurring so a week seems plenty long enough to me. If I need to get into a habit of removing the flash drive once a week to clear out old files manually this is going to get old real fast...
Wow so with my 128GB usb drive I will need to clear it out every 4 or 5 days.
 
Wow so with my 128GB usb drive I will need to clear it out every 4 or 5 days.


that will totally depend on where you are parking it and how much is walking near your car over that time period.

In some cases it'd still have tons of room after a week, in other's it'd be totally full sooner.

Adding a setting to "alert via app when sentry drive is X% full" where you get to set X would be a nice tweak.
 
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My SD card very quickly became corrupted when I enabled Sentry mode. I do not believe it overwrites or clears space the same way the dash cam does. That being said I only had a couple gigs available on the drive. Sentry Mode seems to need way more space than the dash cam. I think it needs a sensitivity feature in future because I turned it on in my garage and it recorded a lot of useless video. I think once it gets dark the cameras seemed to detect the slightest changes in light as motion and start recording.
 
My SD card very quickly became corrupted when I enabled Sentry mode. I do not believe it overwrites or clears space the same way the dash cam does. That being said I only had a couple gigs available on the drive. Sentry Mode seems to need way more space than the dash cam. I think it needs a sensitivity feature in future because I turned it on in my garage and it recorded a lot of useless video. I think once it gets dark the cameras seemed to detect the slightest changes in light as motion and start recording.
Sentry Mode videos are written to a "saved" folder and not automatically overwritten like Dashcam videos.

With the advent of Sentry Mode, three cameras are now being used for all (Dashcam and Sentry) video recordings, so storage space definitely gets eaten up faster than when only the front camera was used.

As for the extraneous videos, I think that's one reason Sentry Mode always reverts to OFF after every session. It's too easy to forget to turn it off and you end up with a lot of junk. Better to manually enable it just for the occasions/situations where it's needed.
 
My only issue is currently Sentry mode will corrupt the SD card when it gets full. They need to fix that or at the least add a format card option in the car. Ideally a UI to delete unwanted videos would be the best. Also some estimation based on size remaining would be great.
 
Over the last few days of use I've noticed some corrupt files (partial green recordings and noise from a low bit rate or their handling of low light or sharpening, really not sure). Have been looking over my files from when I pulled the flashdrive this morning to see where the issues are. Been cloudy and raining so not the best lighting conditions to judge by either. You can read license plates of TeslaCam footage of cars in front of you and the feature definitely would be useful if someone runs a red light and hits you or rear ends you as you can show you were stopped when hit for example. No doubt this will get better and it's a great resource to have and love that it can be done through OTA updates. Right now having fun testing it out. I've also taken to making notes every time I do something that would affect the use of TeslaCam or Sentry Mode so I can compare it to what got recorded. Helps spot what was going on at the time.