VisibleTesla

[ricwilson]

Just found VisibleTesla, what a great app you're building. Thanks so much for doing this!

 

[Koryin]

It seems like a lot of the features of this application would work better as a remote web service that is always monitoring the car. However that has privacy issues.

But with that said, does anyone have interest in a website that you could do it all though?

 

[Olen]

I have made my own "Invisible Tesla" that is exactly that. It is a small deamon that is constantly polling the REST API, and following the streaming API, saving all the data to a SQLite-database.
That way I can have multiple "viewers" or "clients" reading from that database instead of all of them pulling info from the car itself (and thereby overloading Teslas servers).
It incurs a delay of up to one minute before the clients get an updated status (the deamon only polls the REST API once every minute), but on the other hand, the clients will always respond quickly and feel snappy, because it is much faster to read from the database than to poll the API.
It is pretty rough around the edges so far, but seems to work fine, and have been monitoring our car for about 24 hours now without a hickup.

 

[hans]

I have made my own "Invisible Tesla" that is exactly that. It is a small deamon that is constantly polling the REST API, and following the streaming API, saving all the data to a SQLite-database.
That way I can have multiple "viewers" or "clients" reading from that database instead of all of them pulling info from the car itself (and thereby overloading Teslas servers).
It incurs a delay of up to one minute before the clients get an updated status (the deamon only polls the REST API once every minute), but on the other hand, the clients will always respond quickly and feel snappy, because it is much faster to read from the database than to poll the API.
It is pretty rough around the edges so far, but seems to work fine, and have been monitoring our car for about 24 hours now without a hickup.

Unless you add some extra logic to your polling app, you car will never enter sleep mode. Not sure if you care, but just letting you know since I had to code around this myself.

 

[Olen]

I know. Since my most important reason for making this was to monitor if charging stopped, I could make some logic to limit polling when not charging or something, but I am not sure if it really matters.

 

[jpasqua]

Sweet app. Is there anyway to create more than 2 geofences besides coming and going?

Not at the moment.

 

[jpasqua]

It seems like a lot of the features of this application would work better as a remote web service that is always monitoring the car. However that has privacy issues.

But with that said, does anyone have interest in a website that you could do it all though?

A number of people have expressed interest in this. In fact, I wish Tesla would do it themselves. They've got much better data than we have access to and they already have to deal with your credentials.

Joe

 

[jpasqua]

Just found VisibleTesla, what a great app you're building. Thanks so much for doing this!

Thank you, glad you're enjoying it.

 

[jpasqua]

Dear VisibleTesla Gurus: where do I find readings on the tire pressure?

Unfortunately tire pressure is not reported through the API (at least no one has found it). If it gets added to the api I will add it to VT.

 

[jpasqua]

Interestingly, I've seen the opposite of ZBB. As you're aware, I've had tons of issues with missing trips and such back through several versions, possibly due to my vehicle losing data connection for much of each night while sleeping. Since updating to 0.29 last weekend, I haven't had a single issue, which is the longest it's ever gone without VT needing restarted.

So while there may be some other stuff going on, based on what I've seen so far I do think you've fixed some things with your re-factoring.

Makes me wonder if they aren't prepping the servers for 6.0, though, given it sounds like mobile app changes were required.

I'm glad things are working better for you.

I've been having really poor stability from Tesla lately. Lots of errors back from their servers. I've been on the road almost since this behavior began and haven't had much of a chance to look into it. It may have to do with them upgrading server software for 6.0. That's pure speculation.

 

[HankLloydRight]

Does anything bad happen if I run VT from two different computers at the same time? I've had problems with VT silently crashing on Win7, so when I come back from a weekend trip, I've got nothing logged. So I was thinking of running it also on an old WinXP box at the same time, so if one dies, the other is still running.

 

[ZBB]

I'm glad things are working better for you.

I've been having really poor stability from Tesla lately. Lots of errors back from their servers. I've been on the road almost since this behavior began and haven't had much of a chance to look into it. It may have to do with them upgrading server software for 6.0. That's pure speculation.

I would say plausible speculation with 6.0 being released today...

On a side note, since downgrading to 0.28.1, VT has been stable again in collecting data. I've been running it almost constantly since March (prior to that I only ran it here and there -- to log a day trip or to manually check charge status instead of the iOS app). The only gaps in my data since then are:
1) A few times I closed the app and forgot to reopen it for a day or two
2) When the car was out of 3G range (on road trips, for a week in Canada) -- VT resumed once it was in 3G range again (or on Wifi at my in-laws in Canada...)
3) 2 times last week on 0.29.0... One of those appeared to be related to Tesla's servers being down (the iOS app couldn't connect either); but when they came back up, VT didn't reconnect. The other was a few days later -- so it ran fine, then went out again. Perhaps its an authentication issue with Tesla? But it took closing VT and restarting to fix, a log-out and log-in didn't work...

 

[jayman]

I've been using this app for a couple of days now and I'm getting trips 1/2 and a lot of the time not recorded. The geofence thing has only worked like 2/20x. Is this tesla's servers and are other people getting this? I was using a hacked method for streaming in the past which worked well to track me so it isn't a cellular issue I am sure.

 

[bollar]

I've been using this app for a couple of days now and I'm getting trips 1/2 and a lot of the time not recorded. The geofence thing has only worked like 2/20x. Is this tesla's servers and are other people getting this? I was using a hacked method for streaming in the past which worked well to track me so it isn't a cellular issue I am sure.

What version? I see this with 29.0 -- 28.1 works well for me.

 

[jayman]

I'm on 29. I'll try 28.1. Thanks.

 

[jpasqua]

Folks,

I've reverted back to 0.28.01 as the current version of VT. That's what you'll get with the standard download link (repeated here for easy access):
Mac
Windows
Linux

Version 0.29.00 is still there, but isn't the default download:
Mac
Windows
Linux

There are a couple of problems conspiring to make 0.29.00 unstable for lots of people. First, there is a bug. Second, there is very different behavior from Tesla's servers which takes a minor bug an amplifies the impact. I haven't released a version with a fix for the bug mentioned above, because I am getting so many errors from Tesla's servers that it is hard for me to know whether the new version is stable.

If you're using 0.29.00 with good success, you don't need to change, but if you're having trouble (as many people are), you can switch back to 0.28.01.

As Tesla rolls out firmware 6.0 and their new app, there may be changes that impact how VT works and what it can do. I'll keep an eye on it and try to adapt.

Joe

 

[simonog]

I know. Since my most important reason for making this was to monitor if charging stopped, I could make some logic to limit polling when not charging or something, but I am not sure if it really matters.

If you use an iPhone, you now, with Vn6, get an alert and I can confirm it works well, reporting when charging starts and stops.

 

[jpasqua]

If you use an iPhone, you now, with Vn6, get an alert and I can confirm it works well, reporting when charging starts and stops.

Very cool! Do you get the alert from the app, or out of band in a text or something like that?

 

[bollar]

Very cool! Do you get the alert from the app, or out of band in a text or something like that?

iOS notifications, outside the app.

 

[jpasqua]

Update

Folks,

There are fairly sizable changes to Tesla's APIs to correspond to the 6.0 firmware release.

For one thing, they have a different server interface. Also, they now require special keys to use the API. I extracted these keys from the latest Android app and am in the process of updating the app to use the new interfaces. There are a number of other changes as well. Most are not very major.

Unfortunately, the new servers don't seem any more stable than the old ones. I'm hoping that once the 6.0 rollout is further along (or complete) they'll get the server side squared away.

The fact that they require special keys to use the APIs may be good news, or it may be bad news. It may point to an actual developer program in which developers are issued keys for use with their API. That would be a good thing. On the other hand, it may be an attempt to lock down their APIs. That would not be so good. Time will tell.

Joe