TeslaDashcamWeb

Introduction

This code sets up a website using nginx to display the footage from a Tesla dashcam, using a Raspberry Pi Zero W as the USB drive. It uses the teslausb project for creating the USB drives on the Pi.

Note: The Tesla car browser doesn't load local websites. So if you want TeslaDashcamWeb to load on the car browser, you will need to perform the steps mentioned here after you have TeslaDashcamWeb working.

Update August 2019

I have stopped using TeslaDashcamWeb because I wanted to merge the three videos from the car into one and view them together in a website. I have created the TeslaCamMerge project to accomplish this. I am running this now instead of TeslaDashcamWeb.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi Zero W
• Micro-USB to USB cable, plugged into one of the Tesla's USB ports
• Tesla car!
• If you want to access this on your car browser, another Raspberry Pi (3B+ works well for me) to run an nginx reverse proxy server

Software

• Raspbian Stretch Lite
• nginx web server
• rclone
• Responsive File Manager
• If you want to access this on your car browser, an update client from a dynamic DNS service to run on your nginx reverse proxy server

Instructions

Load a Pi Zero W with Raspbian Stretch Lite and get SSH going

1. Load Raspbian Stretch Lite on a Micro SD card
2. On your computer, install Notepad++ or similar text editor that saves Unix-style line endings correctly
3. In the boot drive of the Micro SD card, open config.txt in Notepad++ and add a new line at the end with this content and save it: dtoverlay=dwc2
4. Open cmdline.txt, make these changes and save it:
   • Before rootwait, add modules-load=dwc2,g_ether
   • Remove the init=/usr/lib/raspi-config/init_resize.sh at the end
5. Add an empty file called ssh (no extension) in the same folder
6. Safely eject the Micro SD card from your computer
7. Insert the Micro SD card into a Pi and boot it up
8. Install Putty on your computer and try to connect to raspberrypi.local; you may need to install Bonjour for Windows if that doesn't work
9. Login in Putty using the id pi and password raspberry
10. Change password, locale, timezone, etc. and enter your WiFi credentials using sudo raspi-config; do not reboot when exiting raspi-config
11. Check that your Pi is connnecting to WiFi using sudo wpa_cli -i wlan0 reconfigure
12. Confirm you have an IP address with ifconfig wlan0
13. Edit /boot/cmdline.txt with your favorite editor using sudo to delete g_ether from the modules-load phrase so it looks like modules-load=dwc2
14. Reboot with sudo reboot
15. Use Putty and login with your new password to the pi account, you now have a working SSH connection

Update the Pi and load required software

1. sudo apt update
2. sudo apt upgrade
3. sudo apt install nginx php-fpm php-mbstring git

Configure php-fpm

sudo nano /etc/php/7.0/fpm/php.ini and make these changes:

• Replace the line that contains cgi.fix_pathinfo=1 with cgi.fix_pathinfo=0
• Replace the line that contains session.save_path with session.save_path = /tmp/php/sessions

Configure nginx

1. sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default, edit these lines to look like:

      index index.html index.htm index.php index.nginx-debian.html;
      location ~ \.php$ {
            include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
            # With php-fpm (or other unix sockets):
            fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
      }

2. sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, edit the log location lines:

      access_log /tmp/log/nginx/access.log;
      error_log /tmp/log/nginx/error.log;	

3. mkdir -p /tmp/log/nginx
4. sudo nginx -t
5. Restart nginx with sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart
6. On your computer browser, navigate to the LAN IP of your Pi, you should see the default nginx welcome page

Configure rclone

1. sudo -i
2. Install rclone with curl -L https://raw.github.com/pageauc/rclone4pi/master/rclone-install.sh | bash
3. rclone config and follow prompts; recommended:
   • Name the drive as gdrive
   • Use drive for Google Drive
   • Set up scope as 3 for drive.file
4. exit (from interactive sudo session)

Update sudoers and rc.local

1. sudo -i
2. echo "www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" > /etc/sudoers.d/020_www-data-nopasswd
3. Check the location of your rclone configuration file: try ls /root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf and ls /root/.rclone.conf and see which one it is. If your file is not at /root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf, you need to replace this with the correct location of that .conf file in the next step when updating /etc/rc.local
4. nano /etc/rc.local and update the first line of the file to #!/bin/bash -e, then add this block of code just before the line exit 0

LOGFILE=/tmp/rc.local.log

function log () {
	echo -n "$( date )" >> "$LOGFILE"
	echo -n ": " >> "$LOGFILE"
	echo "$1" >> "$LOGFILE"
}

log "Running fsck..."
/sbin/fsck /mnt/cam -- -a >> "$LOGFILE" 2>&1 || echo ""
log "Running modprobe..."
/sbin/modprobe g_mass_storage >> "$LOGFILE" 2>&1
log "Preparing temp files..."
/bin/cp /root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf /tmp/rclone.conf >> "$LOGFILE" 2>&1
/bin/chmod 644 /tmp/rclone.conf >> "$LOGFILE" 2>&1
/bin/mkdir -p /var/log/nginx >> "$LOGFILE" 2>&1
/bin/mkdir -p /tmp/php/sessions >> "$LOGFILE" 2>&1
/bin/chown www-data:pi /tmp/php/sessions >> "$LOGFILE" 2>&1
/bin/mkdir -p /tmp/log/nginx >> "$LOGFILE" 2>&1
log "Starting nginx..."
/usr/sbin/service nginx start >> "$LOGFILE" 2>&1
log "All done"

4. exit (from interactive sudo session)

Load website scripts

1. mkdir /home/pi/dash
2. Set up some permissions:
   • sudo chown -R pi:www-data /home/pi/dash
   • sudo chown -R pi:www-data /var/www/html
3. cd /home/pi/dash
4. Download the scripts with git clone https://github.com/ppamidimarri/TeslaDashcamWeb
5. Move the website scripts with cp -r /home/pi/dash/TeslaDashcamWeb/html/ /var/www/
6. Move python scripts with mv /home/pi/dash/TeslaDashcamWeb/*connect* /home/pi/dash
7. More permissions:
   • chmod +x /home/pi/dash/*
8. On your computer browser, navigate to the LAN IP of your Pi, you should see the Tesla Dashcam welcome page

Create USB drives on the Pi

This section is work-in-progress as the teslausb project hasn't merged in latest changes needed to work with Tesla software versions 2019.5.1 and newer. For now, follow these instructions as root with sudo -i to get it working.

Once you run the script fully and reboot the Pi, you should see the drive CAM automatically mount on your laptop (and MUSIC if you set that up). The CAM drive should have a folder called TeslaCam in it. If you then SSH into your Pi, you should see that your root filesystem is now read-only. After this point, if you need to change anything on the Pi, you can do it by running sudo mount -o remount,rw / and that will remount the root filesystem until the next reboot.

Create some symlinks for the dashcam clips on the Pi

1. sudo mount -o remount,rw /
2. cd /var/www/html
3. mount /mnt/cam
4. ln -s /mnt/cam/TeslaCam .
5. ls /mnt/cam/TeslaCam and see if folders RecentClips and SavedClips exist; if they don't create them with mkdir /mnt/cam/TeslaCam/RecentClips and mkdir /mnt/cam/TeslaCam/SavedClips
6. mkdir thumbs
7. cd thumbs
8. ln -s /mnt/cam/TeslaCam/RecentClips .
9. ln -s /mnt/cam/TeslaCam/SavedClips .
10. chmod 775 /var/www/html/thumbs/
11. umount /mnt/cam
12. sudo shutdown now

Congratulations, you are done now! Plug your Pi into the Tesla and wait for the dashcam icon to appear. Once it appears, open the browser in the car and navigate to the hostname/IP of the Pi.

Screenshots

1. Front page of the website

2. View of folders within the TeslaCam folder

3. View of clips available, with options to Preview, Rename, Delete or Upload them to Google Drive

4. This is how Preview looks

5. Uploading a clip to Google Drive

6. Upload status after it is done