TeslaCam Experience

[RedMod3]

Driving back along the M27 today in Lane 1, I was almost forced into the hard shoulder area by a car in Lane 2 that was about to give me a broadside.

I'm not sure if it was me or Einstein (the name of my Tesla), but the car lurched momentarily into the hard shoulder to avoid a collision and I sounded the horn.

This evening I went out to remove my 256GB Sandisk USB drive and inspected it and found in the TeslaCam folder there were 3 folders:

RecentClips - this was empty

SavedClips - this had a folder of today with 10 mins of video before I sounded the horn, and an event.json file identifying the horn operation as triggering the save.

SentryClips - Multiple folders by date and time with Sentry events from when I bought the car.

What was curious was there were NO files in the RecentClips folder, so I scanned the USB drive for deleted files and sure enough, all the last hour of videos were there, but they had been deleted (but could have been recovered).

So, the message is, if you need to copy any recent files, pull out the USB stick out after you have put the car into park, and before you turn it on again.

 

[Yachtsman]

I'm not sure if it was me or Einstein (the name of my Tesla), but the car lurched momentarily into the hard shoulder to avoid a collision and I sounded the horn.

What options were you using at the time i.e. cruise?

 

[phil4]

The Tesla dashcam doens't work like any dashcam you've ever used before.

They all just record in an endless loop onto a memory card etc, so you'll always have the last hour, day, week or whatever of your driving depending on card space.

Tesla doesn't do that. While it writes to RecentClips, it only saves those (to SavedClips) when you hit the horn or click on the icon to tell it to. The stuff in RecentClips is just temporary bits so that it can save stuff in the past. I believe it saves the last hour, but even that's not always going to be there.

So you can save your last 10 mins by clicking the icon on the screen... or hitting the horn, or as said above, pull the USB.

 

[nxsynjs]

I do wish it would act as a traditional dashcam. Seems much safer and more reliable than needing the driver to remember to hit a save button or the horn in the event of an accident when they could be in no mental state to remember to do so.

 

[Klagio]

The Tesla dashcam doens't work like any dashcam you've ever used before.

They all just record in an endless loop onto a memory card etc, so you'll always have the last hour, day, week or whatever of your driving depending on card space.

Tesla doesn't do that. While it writes to RecentClips, it only saves those (to SavedClips) when you hit the horn or click on the icon to tell it to. The stuff in RecentClips is just temporary bits so that it can save stuff in the past. I believe it saves the last hour, but even that's not always going to be there.

So you can save your last 10 mins by clicking the icon on the screen... or hitting the horn, or as said above, pull the USB.

256Gbyte its a lot of space, I wonder how much footage it holds (a week, more?)

 

[MrBadger]

One hour. Everything else is constantly ‘overwritten’

Size of recording media is largely immaterial.

It only stores save clips / honk horn or undeleted sentry events and even those are purged.

 

[Klagio]

One hour. Everything else is constantly ‘overwritten’

Size of recording media is largely immaterial.

It only stores save clips / honk horn or undeleted sentry events and even those are purged.

then no need to get USB with bigger space ??

One hour footage even of 8 cameras is for sure less then 256Gb

 

[MrBadger]

Correct although bigger drive will improve life by reducing how often the media is rewritten.

Iirc the new cars are shipping with a 64GB media drive.

 

[Klagio]

Correct although bigger drive will improve life by reducing how often the media is rewritten.

Iirc the new cars are shipping with a 64GB media drive.

is there any way/hack t change that hour limit? Wonder why they put this limit after all

 

[MrBadger]

Keep pressing the horn

Seriously, Tesla do things their way and worth noting that sentry/dashcam was an after thought and is not really a dashcam competitor so not too much effort put into it. Its only recently that we got the ability to view clips in the car.

 

[Klagio]

Keep pressing the horn

Seriously, Tesla do things their way and worth noting that sentry/dashcam was an after thought and is not really a dashcam competitor so not too much effort put into it. Its only recently that we got the ability to view clips in the car.

ahaha ok, no problem here in Italy, people press horn all the time, I will go unnoticed .

Anyway I am sue this can be fixed by some clever guy with a Raspberry Pi and some Linux experience.

EDIT: found

 

[MrBadger]

I haven't watched the whole video but if its what I think it is, I don't think it will do what you want. A few on here have used it with varying levels of success.

If it is, it basically acted as media drive, but when it came into range of home network, it uploaded the contents of the folders to the home network. It didn't get around the limitations of what was saved to these folders, ie, recent clips folder still only contained the latest hour of drive - I'm not actually sure if that folder was backed up.

 

[phil4]

I haven't watched the whole video but if its what I think it is, I don't think it will do what you want. A few on here have used it with varying levels of success.

If it is, it basically acted as media drive, but when it came into range of home network, it uploaded the contents of the folders to the home network. It didn't get around the limitations of what was saved to these folders, ie, recent clips folder still only contained the latest hour of drive - I'm not actually sure if that folder was backed up.

I've got Teslacam running (since I got the car), and you're spot on, it uploads the SavedClips and Sentry cam when it connects to your home wifi... even if it transfers (which mine doesn't) the Recent clips, it'll still only do that when you return home, so you'll only get the past hour.

 

[nxsynjs]

A bit off topic. I use the Teslacam raspberry pi and combine it with Tesla_dashcam ( ehendrix23/tesla_dashcam )with to merge all the various camera files into a single Mp4. Since it's using the Pi anyway has anyone used cron to move out the last hours drive to another directory(maybe to the SavedClips Directory) and then create a blank ready for the next hour.

it's been 20 years since I last played with unix scripts but it must be possible

 

[RedMod3]

What options were you using at the time i.e. cruise?

All switched on: Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance; Blind Spot Collision Warning Chime; Automatic Emergency Braking; Obstacle-Aware Acceleration.

I guess that explains.

 

[NewbieT]

I haven't watched the whole video but if its what I think it is, I don't think it will do what you want. A few on here have used it with varying levels of success.

If it is, it basically acted as media drive, but when it came into range of home network, it uploaded the contents of the folders to the home network. It didn't get around the limitations of what was saved to these folders, ie, recent clips folder still only contained the latest hour of drive - I'm not actually sure if that folder was backed up.

Could just setup the Pi to copy all files saved in Recent Clips to another folder or just remove permissions to delete.