lairdb
Member
Yes, that's the core behavior. The optional behavior is to also connect to another network.
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Teslacam - dash cam with a usb drive that has wifi capabilities
- Thread starter jrmnet
- Start date
Yes, that's the core behavior. The optional behavior is to also connect to another network.
israndy
Supercharger Hunter
Cheapest? Remember most people also have to buy the memory stick for the Verbatim. While I only paid $28 for my Sandisk Connect 64GB wireless USB stick. When you want to use it you simply press the power button and when the car turns off and drops the USB port the stick has a battery and connects to your home WiFi and allows you to look at what's on it from the comfort of your home. At the same time, it creates its own WiFi for when you are away. BUT when you get back in your car and the USB port powers up, it immediately re-connects, no issues w/ forgetting to flip it back to USB mode. No missed DashCam footage.
I mean if you have to flip the switch in order to access it from inside, why not just pull the drive and bring it inside? It could be a visual reminder that you need to put it back, sitting by the front door.
Next step is to compare the battery life between the two solutions.
-Randy
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So it seems that Sandisk and Verbatim have the same functionality. Is that true?
Is it possible to delete files from SanDisk via WiFi?
C141medic
Active Member
The total cost for the Verbatim and a Sandisk 128gb sdhc card came to around $40 from Amazon. I believe the functionality of the two devices are fairly similar. And if you forget to switch the device back to usb mode you won’t see a dashcam icon on the screen, so hopefully that’ll alert you to switch it to usb mode. I believe battery life is approximately three hours, which should be more than enough to play around with saved files.
C141medic
Active Member
lairdb
Member
I returned it, so I can’t do new experiments, but I believe the Sandisk device did not support multiple partitions.
israndy
Supercharger Hunter
The Sandisk is the same as any USB, so you can partition it, and you can remotely view and delete pictures, music, or videos off it using their app. I don't believe the second partition would be visible to that app so you would have to put music on that partition using your computer. Just like when you format the drive ExFat their app reads it, but the Tesla won't, so dual partition the Tesla reads but their app might not.
It will be interesting to see what solution people come up with that allows R/W access to the drive simultaneously from both the Tesla and your computer. I don't know of any file system that handles that. So you would need something that is doing Meta access to the drive, caching changes that can be written when it receives full access to the drive, but at the moment I don't know of any solution that even allows dual READ access to a USB device. With a Pi you would have to receive communications from the USB port as though you were a dumb writable device and then save the actual data somewhere, but you would still need to prevent secondary writes as long as the USB communications were happening or the Tesla was get confused by expecting no changes to the drive and then trying to write more data, corrupting the file system.
-Randy
It will be interesting to see what solution people come up with that allows R/W access to the drive simultaneously from both the Tesla and your computer. I don't know of any file system that handles that. So you would need something that is doing Meta access to the drive, caching changes that can be written when it receives full access to the drive, but at the moment I don't know of any solution that even allows dual READ access to a USB device. With a Pi you would have to receive communications from the USB port as though you were a dumb writable device and then save the actual data somewhere, but you would still need to prevent secondary writes as long as the USB communications were happening or the Tesla was get confused by expecting no changes to the drive and then trying to write more data, corrupting the file system.
-Randy
lairdb
Member
Ah -- couldn't quite recall, and don't have it any more to investigate; thanks for the clarificaiton. @Randy Spencer, what size do you have, and how have you allocated multiple partitions?
On the Verbatim stick, the Verbatim software can see all partitions, and (while in wifi mode) allows r/w access to all partitions.
That's not a file system problem; nearly every file system in the world contains handling for multiple access, otherwise NASes, network shares, etc., wouldn't ever work. For that matter, it's not materially different (at the file system level) from multiple processes on the same computer accessing the drive. FAT (FAT, FAT16, FAT32, etc.), for example, support file level lock, byte range lock, etc. (For Windows folks -- start at FsRtlInitializeFileLock and follow the chain through -- or rather, don't, since the OS handles it all.) As long as applications are willing to catch exceptions (e.g. "you can't delete that, someone else is using it" (which will come back as a System.IO exception in dotNET)), that's all at the robust-or-brittle-application level.
Introducing access through USB as well as other avenues is not materially different at the file system level, but mediating at the device level is a little different, so I suspect mixing access while still allowing the USB client to access it as a raw device is a little tricky.
DCEV
Member
C141medic
Active Member
I can only comment regarding the Verbatim, but in my opinion it’s a lot more versatile as you mentioned you can replace the sd card if it goes bad. Also, the max capacity of the Verbatim is 128gb vs 64gb for the Sandisk. And at $40 for the sd card and device is a decent deal.
israndy
Supercharger Hunter
True, the SanDisk at 128GB+ is pretty expensive, but I am not sure what you would do with all that space, the camera starts overwriting files after only an hour. My 64GB stick is mostly empty. And to answer the other question it is not partitioned, all my music is on my phone.
As to multiple accessing a drive you are saying what I am saying. All access is controlled by the file system which DOESN'T live on the stick. The USB stick is just dumb media. If two different file systems try to access the same drive it will become corrupt. I used to have a SCSI buss with multiple drives on it that I accessed from multiple computers, I had to eject and re-connect to any drive that had been modified by the other Amiga computer. Today, that is much harder, computers access drives ALL the time. Who knows when they were last touched? Even those devices that can connect to the iPhone with a Lightning connector or the Mac with a USB connector will not recognize the second connector once the first is connected, too many file systems would corrupt the drive.
Thus the USB sticks will block access via WiFi when connected via USB. WiFi connectivity is different, set up like a server, file changes are sent to the stick that performs them in concert with other devices that are attached. When a change happens all remote connections are updated. That would be a way to do it. Find a USB stick that has no media, it connects to a remote WiFi server and sends it's data there. Then you could read it as the Tesla was writing to it.
I don't know of any such device.
-Randy
As to multiple accessing a drive you are saying what I am saying. All access is controlled by the file system which DOESN'T live on the stick. The USB stick is just dumb media. If two different file systems try to access the same drive it will become corrupt. I used to have a SCSI buss with multiple drives on it that I accessed from multiple computers, I had to eject and re-connect to any drive that had been modified by the other Amiga computer. Today, that is much harder, computers access drives ALL the time. Who knows when they were last touched? Even those devices that can connect to the iPhone with a Lightning connector or the Mac with a USB connector will not recognize the second connector once the first is connected, too many file systems would corrupt the drive.
Thus the USB sticks will block access via WiFi when connected via USB. WiFi connectivity is different, set up like a server, file changes are sent to the stick that performs them in concert with other devices that are attached. When a change happens all remote connections are updated. That would be a way to do it. Find a USB stick that has no media, it connects to a remote WiFi server and sends it's data there. Then you could read it as the Tesla was writing to it.
I don't know of any such device.
-Randy
DCEV
Member
So I think I'm going to give the Verbatim a try... Seems that's really the best option available for now. and I'll then have to figure out how to support two data USB outlets and 1 power outlet for the phone dock using the two available ports.
DCEV
Member
Just placed an order with a Samsung 128 GB Endurance card that's specifically designed for use with dash cams.
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Endu...card+128&qid=1554750893&s=electronics&sr=1-18
I'll report back how it works...
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Endu...card+128&qid=1554750893&s=electronics&sr=1-18
I'll report back how it works...
lairdb
Member
We're either saying the same thing from completely different perspectives, or.. something else... but I don't think what we mean by file system is the same thing. I think you are using "file system" to mean the OS drivers.
The media, whether it's a stick or a card or a DASD or a floppy or a reel tape, or a paper tape, is a piece of media. The filesystem consists of the agreed-upon layout of files recorded upon that media; dumb media, written in an agreed format. That's why I can take a FAT32 formatted piece of media from a Winbox and connect it to another box (e.g. the Tesla) and it is readable. That is the common use of the term file system: the physical layout on the piece of media.
The file system driver in the OS is responsible for the reading and writing of the physical media -- it is certainly the case that multiple clients of the file system driver can simultaneously access files on the media. At the moment on the computer on which I'm typing, 317 processes are accessing 9831 distinct files on one piece of media; in many cases, several processes are accessing the same exact file, and in a few cases, several processes are writing to different areas of the same file. This is all mediated by the file system driver running on the OS.
Given good driver implementations, there's nothing preventing the local OS, a network-based client of the OS, and a USB-connected client of the OS, from all accessing the physical media at the same time. This is exactly what is happening in the Pi-based implementations: the local piece of media is accessed by application clients running in the OS, by WiFi SMB clients, and by the Tesla vehicle client(via the USB) at the same time. The vehicle client takes an exclusive lock on the files it is currently writing, which (through driver features) prevent other processes from writing to that same file at that same time, but as soon as the vehicle client releases the file, other OS clients can access it.
What's going on here that's non-obvious is that in this scenario, the vehicle is not directly accessing the media at all. The vehicle is accessing a representation of the media that is brokered by the drivers within the OS running on the Pi; the OS is therefore able to manage multiple clients working on the same physical media.
There's nothing preventing the Sandisk or Verbatim from working the same way -- except developer and SQA time. It's simpler and cheaper to dismount the piece of media (SD card) from the OS that exposes it to WiFi clients, and mount it exclusively to the USB, and so forth back and forth.
(There are a few physical-layer media interfaces that allow multiple storage clients to be connected at the same time (SCSI is a good example) and a very very very few OS implementations that allow multiple manipulators of the same piece of media (AmigaOS, for example, did not; thus the need to dismount a volume from one initiator before mounting it to another.))
(Whether a fibre-channel SAN in fabric mode is really multiple initiators using the same media, or is a broker mediating between initiators and media, begins to get more religious than factual.)
lairdb
Member
I have one vehicle port wired directly to the dock, and one to this hub https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B003M0NURK. The passenger side dock connector and the USB drive/drives are connected to the hub, which limits the passenger side to 500mA charge current, but that's ok for me.
C141medic
Active Member
This is what I bought with the Verbatim and it works perfectly.
Anker Ultra Slim 4-Port USB 3.0... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014OS45OK?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
An interesting experiment would be the following: Since the WiFi drives does not allow simultaneous access WiFi and USB we might consider an other way to get the footage on the drives while in WiFi mode. This should be possible if we are capable of writing the dashcam footage using WiFi to the SSD drive. Maybe using a paired USB to WiFi stick, would take care of it. Off course powering the drive, multi-user access, and infinitely enabling WiFi could be an other problem, but first things first.....
DCEV
Member
I think the issue is that WIFI is not always the most stable protocol for constant data writing, as you'd normally see with a dash cam...
We really need to figure out a hardwired USB solution that also offers WIFI connectivity at the same time. Sort of like a USB drive plugged into Windows and also shared on the network via WIFI...
We really need to figure out a hardwired USB solution that also offers WIFI connectivity at the same time. Sort of like a USB drive plugged into Windows and also shared on the network via WIFI...
DCEV
Member
Just bought this and I'm setting it up.
How did you connect with HTTP? I tried 192.168.1.1 and 10.10.10.1 it failed to work.
Do you recommend an Android app that would allow me to access files in the drive via WIFI? For the reasons you provided, I'd rather use a "standard" network file access all than their own app, which apparently they have stopped updating and has negative reviews.
EDIT: NEVER MIND I FIXED IT: You need to browse to 10.10.10.254
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lairdb
Member
Followup report.
On Sunday evening, I paused dashcam with a long press, flipped the Verbatim device into WiFi mode and confirmed that it had attached to my local network, and launched a robocopy command line to move all the files. It took a few hours to move about 30GB from the device, over the wifi, to a local drive. IIRC, it completed in the first pass; it was on car power for a while, then on self-contained power, then eventually, sometime after the copy completed, the self-contained power ran out.
I was also able to reach the music partition and add some content while it was wifi attached.
Monday morning, I flipped the switch back to USB mode and resumed dashcam with a long press.
The robocopy job remained running and just circled on errors that it was unable to reach the source.
On Tuesday evening, I paused dashcam with a long press and flipped the Verbatim device into WiFi mode. After about a minute, it reattached to the network; after a couple more minutes the robocopy job tried again, found the device, and again moved all the files -- in this case, it was about 11GB (3.6 in RecentFiles; 7.4 in ten Sentry captures).
Wednesday morning, I flipped the switch back to USB mode and resumed dashcam with a long press.
Net: Highly successful.
Possible enhancements:
- don't bother capturing RecentClips.
- move older files, but only copy the most recent files, so that the most recent remain on the stick for a while.
- automatically sync music files to the other partition when attached.
RecentClips overwrites after an hour, for a steady-state ~4GB, but SavedClips grows every time the user, or Sentry, saves a set of clips; about 857 to 950 MB per save. In my particular usage pattern over the last couple of days, that's 4 to 6 captures per day, or about 21 days to fill 128GB.
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