00mjk / zerostick

A zero effort IoT solution to a USB stick with remote access to Tesla Sentry Mode/Dashcam videos

Tesla Cam automation with a Raspberry Pi Zero W or Raspberry Pi 4

Description

Ideas:

• Use a Raspberry Pi Zero W (USB powered device) to act as USB storage for a Tesla.
• Use the Pi to serve a web interface accessible from the in car browser.
• Let the user setup sync of video clips stored by the car to external services (OneDrive, home local NAS/PC device)
• Reverse syncing of music to the Pi, for in car usage.
• Let the setup process be a painless as possible - There are users without Linux experience out there.
• Provide streamable access to the video clips via WiFi on the move; Create WiFi in Ad-Hoc AP mode, web interface to display/delete/archive videos.

Inspiration

There are solutions out there that does this, but they have little traction, because they either are too complicated for non Linux users or, in the case where there has been an attempt to create some UI, aren't as functional. My wish is to combine those.

This could potentially also be used as a music USB storage for other brands of cars, accessing the UI from a smartphone to manage it.

How it will work/How it will be build

Stuff needed:

• Raspberry Pi Zero W. This specific model of the Pi has support for USB OTG (On-The-Go, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go ) and WiFi, the other models have a USB HUB, which disabled this functionality.
• A USB-A to USB-Micro cable
• A Micro-SD card (32 GB or larger, good quality, fast to be able to handle 3 simultaneous streams) Ie SanDisk Extreme Micro/SDXC A2/U3/V30 256GB or Samsung Pro+
• A way to attach a Micro-SD card to your Mac/PC
• Optionally: A Tesla

Setup

• Download the ZeroStick image (Or build it yourself)
• Put the image on a Micro-SD card
• Install the software from here (Instructions later)
• Insert SD card into the Raspberry Pi
• Attach Pi to your car (Attach the micro-USB cable to the Power+data port on the Pi Zero (The port closest to the center of the long side of the Pi. Using the other one will only give power to the Pi)).
• Configure WiFi via the build in Access Point (AP) in your car.

Developing/building the zerostick

Build the ZeroStick controller for your own machine

make

To run it

make run

Create an image for the Pi

make image

It will end up in build/pi-gen/deploy as a .img file that can be put directly to the the SD card.