Automatically Store Your Tesla Sentry Mode and Dashcam Videos on the Decentralized Cloud

I have a 2019 Tesla M3 and I love the built in features to capture Dashcam and Sentry Mode footage for review later. The Sentry Mode feature captures 10 minutes of video when someone or something approaches your parked vehicle. Dashcam captures video when you're driving. It continuously stores the most recent hour of video and will also save the most recent 10 minutes of video when you press the Dashcam button or when you honk your horn. Where do those videos get saved? As it turns out, they get saved to a flash drive, if you have one plugged into one of the USB ports in the front console.

When you get home, you have to pull the flash drive out of the car and copy the video files to your computer to watch them or store them long term. It’s a fairly low-tech way to manage your data. If you don’t free up space on the flash drive, Sentry Mode will eventually fill up the storage device and your Dashcam feature will stop saving video. What if there was an easy way to save all your Sentry Mode and Dashcam videos automatically when you pull into your garage, and ensure you always have space for new videos? As it turns out, this is a solved problem* if you just want to copy the videos to a computer on your home network. We’ve taken this open source project maintained by GitHub user marcone and created by Reddit user drfrank, and connected it to store the videos on Storj DCS, a decentralized cloud storage service that is secure, private, and extremely affordable. 

You can automatically transfer Sentry Mode and Dashcam video clips over WiFi to cloud storage and make room for more videos the next day. We used a Raspberry Pi (a small, low cost, low power computer about the size of an Altoids tin) plugged into the USB port in the dashboard to store the video files. When the Tesla pulls into the garage at night, the Raspberry Pi connects via WiFi and uploads all the videos to Storj DCS cloud storage, then clears off the drive for use the next day. This will also work for videos recorded in Track Mode if you have one of the performance models, making it easy to share any of the videos with your friends.

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