Wall Connector Gen 3 continuously transmits network traffic

[Art84]

Hey guys,

I have just recently installed Gen 3 wall connector and connected to wi-fi. Don't use it yet because don't have a car yet. But I have noticed from my router statistics, that Wall Connector continuously sends and receives some network traffic. Mostly sends. About 20 MB per day combined.
I assume Tesla continuously gathers some information from the charger, but does anybody have insights into what kind of information they collect?

 

[RTPEV]

You weren't aware that it does crypto-mining when not in use?

 

[Mike1080i]

I installed a Gen 3 about 10 days ago and I have noticed the same thing. It uploads slightly more than it downloads and combined is about 1 to 1.5MBytes of traffic per hour 24/7. It would be interesting to know what data they are collecting and what they are using it for.

 

[Undecided_2]

Upload speeds on my ‘broadband’ are around 2mb and we work from home. I’m glad that you posted as I was going to put wifi in the garage, not anymore if the WC 3 is doing stuff on its own. Skynet perhaps?

 

[Art84]

Upload speeds on my ‘broadband’ are around 2mb and we work from home. I’m glad that you posted as I was going to put wifi in the garage, not anymore if the WC 3 is doing stuff on its own. Skynet perhaps?

your upload speed is 2mb per second, whereas the wall charger uploads stuff at 2mb per hour. So don't worry about network pressure at all.

 

[Undecided_2]

your upload speed is 2mb per second, whereas the wall charger uploads stuff at 2mb per hour. So don't worry about network pressure at all.

But what is it sending? 2mb can contain a lot of data.

 

[Art84]

This is what I am curious about. Wall Connector doing it 24/7.

 

[RTPEV]

This is what I am curious about. Wall Connector doing it 24/7.

Guess I'm not surprised that it communicates 24/7 (how would it know otherwise--given that there is some need to communicate at all--what times it should and shouldn't communicate). Whatever it is doing (polling the connector for status or usage information, for whatever reason), it would make sense that it would do it around the clock. But as you are asking (fairly), what exactly is the nature of its communication?

Sure, as a percentage of the available bandwidth, it may be small, but that's still a lot of data. 1MB per hour is about 300 bytes per second, or a more realistic interval to poll status of one minute, that's about 17.5KB of data every minute. Even assuming that there is some kind of need for it to transmit detailed status information (such as voltage, current, temperature, connected vehicle ID, connector status), when the thing is idle it doesn't seem like the payload of the data packets would need to be so huge.

Then again, the original MCU of the Model S & X used software based on a Linux kernel that assumed it was okay to write gobs of logfile data to a /tmp directory. Maybe this is just dumping out tons of stdout/stderr data to the internet. And especially if something is sending data back to it, that something must be VERY busy communicating with all the wall connectors out there!

 

[ATPMSD]

This is just the nature of the beast for all the connected devices we have in our homes. And assuming you connect your car to your home WiFi you will see more traffic.

 

[Mike1080i]

If it's just sitting idle (which mine is most of the time) and looking through it at /api/1/vitals, about the only thing I see interesting that it may be reporting back to the mothership is the grid voltage, grid frequency, and temperature. I have a few 24/7 connected devices on my LAN and I don't recall seeing any of them phoning home with a continuous data stream like this. I have a big enough pipe that it isn't a noticeable bandwidth impact, but I am curious to know what they are doing with the data they are probably collecting 24/7 from every WiFi connected Gen 3 WC.

 

[Art84]

I have sent a request to Tesla today with this question. Will see what they going to answer

 

[RTPEV]

I have sent a request to Tesla today with this question. Will see what they going to answer

Will see if they going to answer

fixed that for you...

 

[Mike1080i]

I unplugged about 6 p.m. yesterday and it appears to cut the traffic by about half when it's disconnected and idle versus connected but not charging.

 

[Polymer]

This is just the nature of the beast for all the connected devices we have in our homes. And assuming you connect your car to your home WiFi you will see more traffic.

Except the Wall Connector I'd hardly consider a connected device. It is pretty much a dumb device with almost zero reason to be connected to the network. Yes, firmware updates but given what little synergy/information/value it provides outside of just charging...I dunno..I think everyone is hoping there is more to it than this basically "dumb" device...

 

[RTPEV]

You could make the same argument about your "car" which only has the purpose of getting you from point A to point B. I mean why would it need to be connected to the internet to do its job. Yet look at all the cool stuff you can do with it because it is?

Same for the wall connector. It could work together with your utility or your smart home to enable/disable charging at certain times of the day, or when the grid is clean (or not), or your home is already pulling a lot of power, or when your solar panels are over/under producing. And you could generate a lot of nerdy statistics a la TeslaFi. There are plenty of cool things it can do because it's connected that take it beyond just a dumb switch to connect the car to your electric supply.

(that said, it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be sending gobs of data out all the time)

 

[Art84]

I have noticed that Wall Connector significantly reduced the daily traffic consumption, from 20mb per day, to just about 5mb per day. Probably they made some software update. And they still didn't reply, but the way, what data do they collect.

 

[Undecided_2]

I have noticed that Wall Connector significantly reduced the daily traffic consumption, from 20mb per day, to just about 5mb per day. Probably they made some software update. And they still didn't reply, but the way, what data do they collect.
View attachment 830980

I’m sure mine is tracking what I do in my garage and sending this to Elon for him to tweet about.

 

[Mike1080i]

Late on Monday evening my wall connector updated itself to version 22.23.0 and rebooted. Shortly after I noticed a reduction in the amount of traffic it was generating, down to 4MB or so a day.

 

[kayak1]

The connector has some decent data in it:

http://x.x.x.x/api/1/vitals

http://x.x.x.x/api/1/version

http://x.x.x.x/api/1/wifi_status

http://x.x.x.x/api/1/lifetime

For example:
curl -s http://x.x.x.x/api/1/lifetime | jq
{
"contactor_cycles": 1162,
"contactor_cycles_loaded": 41,
"alert_count": 7,
"thermal_foldbacks": 1,
"avg_startup_temp": 14.6,
"charge_starts": 1162,
"energy_wh": 6545310,
"connector_cycles": 674,
"uptime_s": 49261584,
"charging_time_s": 2276592
}

 

[Art84]

Wow, that's cool! Thank you for the info!
Also I see that firmware auto-update does not work me for some reason. Back in May when I installed wall connector I manually updated it to 22.23.0, and this version still didn't change. The latest version available now is 22.7.0. But why it was not updated automatically?
@Mike1080i you mentioned earlier that you saw how your Wall Connector updated on Monday and rebooted. How did you know about that? What is your current firmware version?