Check Out This Awesome Tesla Hack To Automatically Download Dashcam Footage

In the Tesla Model 3 / Y Owners Club group on Facebook, Tesla owner Hai Doan recommended a great hack for your Tesla. The ability to record from external cameras to a USB or MicroSD card was introduced in software 9.0. More recently, Tesla added the ability to activate cameras when the vehicle detects movement or an impact when turned off, known as Sentry mode.

As you drive around the world you are likely to capture some weird and wonderful things and in the event that something does happen you would want to download this footage so that it will not be overwritten by future recordings. .

To do this currently is a very manual process, so it’s understandable that creative developers have stepped in to provide a solution that should really be embraced by Tesla.

The current method available from Tesla requires you to manually take out the MicroSD card or USB stick from the vehicle, connect it to a computer and transfer the images, then don’t forget to return the storage to capture the next drive. Now there is a better way, as long as your behavior meets 2 critical assumptions.

• You park within range of your wireless network.
• Your wireless network is configured with WPA2 PSK access.

The GitHub project called TeslaUSB, the images of recorded Dashcam videos and Sentry mode events can be automatically transferred to a NAS drive connected to a Windows machine.

Instead of connecting the storage directly to your car, you connect a cheap Raspberry Pi Zero W (around $ 15A) via USB to the Tesla and attach a MicroSD card to the Pi. After you connect the Pi to your WiFi, when you enter in the garage, the images will automatically be transferred to your preferred location on your network (usually a NAS drive). It could also write to a Windows machine with a CIFS share, but it was not disabled in Windows 1709 and later.

Doan specifies that he even receives a pushover notification on the phone when the footage transfer is complete (I’m assuming this is from the NAS). If you’re old school and still run your music collection manually, you can also have it sync to a music folder of your choice, a location then available for the car to play from.

This is a really cool feature and one that Tesla should consider adding to the vehicle software. It has all the necessary ingredients including the ability to connect your car to your home WiFi. Most users won’t be sophisticated or motivated enough to add a Raspberry Pi to their car, but if this was a feature just available through their touchscreen, chances are many would.