- General
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Feature Requests
A "fridge" mode to deleberately limit sleep during the night to keep a fridge on efficiently
I have a 12v compressor fridge. It's great, only draws about 30-40 watts 1/3rd of the time, cycling on and off. The problem is that when the car goes to sleep, the 12v port goes off. It is debatable if wiring an always-on 12v port is good for the 12v battery and it requires hardware mods. Problem is, if you turn off sleep to keep the 12v port on, by using sentry mode or similar, it eats 250w to run a 15w average fridge! You lose 16 to 20km per night, not 2.
One possible solution, easy for Teslafi and very useful to customers is to be able to tell Teslafi, "keep the car awake for 1/3rd of the minutes in every hour when it's parked." One could tune the duty cycle manually, or even adjust it based on interior temperature. (Ideally if one could read the current on the 12v port you could just wake up long enough for one fridge cycle, then sleep for a while, then wake up for another.)
But more simply, just stop the car from sleeping (the lowest power way there is, turning on sentry works but there might be something better.) If it's been sleeping longer than 20 minutes, turn it on for 10, all night. Yes, you would get vampire drain but 1/3rd of what leaving sentry or camp mode, or summon standby on all the time. It would not work with no data connection (perhaps a mobile app could) but it would be a great start?
And could I get it tomorrow? (I might be able with the scheduled actions by hand but I am on vacation.) :-)
Customer support service by UserEcho
Obviously if Tesla would do it it would be fantastic. But since they have not done it in spite of requests, that leaves it to an external app to do the best it can. Teslafi already has a bunch of stuff in it to monitor and manage the sleep of the vehicle, and seems the easiest candidate to include a mode saying how much sleep per hour I want to keep the fridge going.
Same issue here. A simple “keep 12V always on” button would do the job. But that’s more for Tesla, not Teslafi.
No love, I guess? This would be a very special feature because it would actually add functionality to the car, not just report data on it.
If not this, then a way to automate the generation of scripts, and turn them on or off in bulk. For example, I might decide to send a "wake up" every 15 minutes to see what that does, or I could turn on sentry for 10 minutes then off for 20 minutes. That would require creating scores of actions to do this all day, and I would want to turn them all on when trying to power the fridge and turn them all off when I want to use sentry for real or not power the fridge.
For example, I might decide to send a "wake up" every 15 minutes to see what that does, or I could turn on sentry for 10 minutes then off for 20 minutes.
You can do this now with TeslaFi's API functions and some scripting.
I will look that up. You can schedule events, but I did not see the complex scripting. You need that as you want to be able to turn it on and off easily when you need it. Can the scripts access the recent records of how long it's been awake and sleeping. I mean the simplest script would look like (pseudo code)
if( Car has been asleep the last 20 minutes )
wake-up (possibly turn on sentry or other mode to keep it awake)
20 minutes later, turn off sentry
You don't want to turn off sentry if the user wants it on, nor do you want to turn it on if other things are keeping the car awake.
TeslaFi does NOT have any scripting capability of its own that I am aware of.
What you are after is pretty simple with my setup. I have an openHAB home automation system running and I have integrated TeslaFi's API JSON data into it. The openHAB scripting can see how long my Model 3 has been asleep and can send a wake up command if needed.
I don't know your scripting capability, but have a look at TeslaFi's API page and play around with some commands in your browser...
https://www.teslafi.com/api.php
The URL you would want to try to wake the car is...
https://www.teslafi.com/feed.php?token=TOKEN&command=wake_up
You would need to enable API access in TeslaFi, enable the wake_up command and replace the word "TOKEN" with your specific API token.
Yes, I can do this, more a question of time to learn the API etc. than anything. And I do have linux servers that are always on that could do this when I travel (though annoyingly on my last trip my home internet went down for a week for know discernible reason, I may need to write a script that detects that inside and power cycles the cable modem using a wifi plug or something.)
Now, this solution has some flaws -- not super great UI, and it doesn't work if the car is parked in a no data region -- but it's a start.