- This past year, Tesla released to all
those with a capable car.
The ability for it to have its unique
and wildly awesome security system called Sentry mode.
Now this is kind of unheard of where there are multiple
cameras always recording and as a person approaches
the vehicle it turns on and to an alarm state
and if something happens it starts playing classical music
all while recording all of the cameras around the vehicle
for you and you know potentially to pass onto the police
later to use.
But getting that footage and understanding it
in be even just being able to browse through it
and make sense of it has been quite a challenge until now.
Today I want to talk about this little thing called
the roadie, which simplifies that entire process.
Let's free the data.
(upbeat music)
In February of 2019 Tesla launched Sentry mode
and they did so because of all the thefts that occur
and break-ins to cars. They cited a federal stat which says
that there is an estimated one motor vehicle theft
or attempted theft every 40.8 seconds in the United States
as of 2017 and that doesn't include the vast number of car
break-ins that happened nationwide.
According to TESL, the way it works is century mode adds
a unique layer of protection to Tesla vehicles
by continuously monitoring the environment around the car
when it's left unattended.
When enabled sentry mode enters
what they calls standby mode.
This is like many home alarm systems in which the users car
and external cameras are there to detect potential threats.
If a minimal threat is detected, it goes into an alert state
and displays a message on the touchscreen
which warns that the cameras are on
and that it is recording.
If it is a more severe threat is such as someone breaking
a window sensor mode switches to an alarm state,
in which case it activates the car alarm,
increases the brightness of the center display
and plays this awesome music
(upbeat music)
Now Sentry mode can be enabled for those vehicles equipped
with hardware two.
This is the one that has all the cameras surrounding it.
There's three up front, two on the sides, one in the back.
And with that, you just go into security settings
under safety and security and turn sentry mode on.
And if you want a deeper dive into this, my buddy Alex did
a really great video testing. It's showing its capabilities,
throwing a ball at his car.
It's a really well done video.
I'll put a link in the description down below to go check
that if you want to go deeper
into exactly what sentry mode is capable of.
Now the biggest problem here has been trying to view
the footage and you would know that you need to view
the footage if you were in an accident
or if your window is smashed.
But what about if someone keyed your car?
Just scuffed the bumper.
This is where it becomes a challenge
and Sentry mode has a notorious issue
of reporting false positives.
A false, it was where it says there was an event
and it will report this on the screen,
but really it was just someone walking by or a car even.
Now in my own experience, I will park on a busy road
and in San Diego in a somewhat urban environment
and come back an hour later to see dozens, if not 30 plus
events being reported by sentry mode all for basically
no reason, nothing actually happened.
It just vibrated it or someone walked by,
whatever the case may be.
And so in those situations,
someone could have scuffed the bumper or slightly keyed it
intentionally, unintentionally, whatever it is,
and you just drive off because there's just too much
information, right?
It's too much noise, not enough signal.
Well that's where this little guy is aiming to help
because it simplifies the process of accessing that footage
and seeing if something really occurred.
And you may think, well yeah, it just pulled the USB drive
out and plug it into your computer and you're good to go.
But the truth is
is that there are four cameras recording at all times.
So imagine that if you have 36 events reported while you
were in somewhere grabbing a sandwich
and you come back and you want to check that footage,
there are four cameras recording here.
So 36 times four is 144 video clips.
That's why you can't just take the USB out,
pop it in your computer and see the answer.
It's much more involved than that.
Now, Tesla did do a software update later in 2019
that tried to better organize things by putting sentry mode
clips in a separate one from your dash cam,
but still 36 events, four cameras, 144 video files,
nothing actually occurred.
And that's where I think a lot of people will just,
just let it go. They don't even bother because you know,
while it is cool that this feature exists, unless something
major happens to your car, you're probably not gonna go look
at the footage.
So the way roadie works is it's really simple.
It's actually just a very little simple circuit board
and I'll kind of pop it off here.
You can kind of see that basically it replaces the USB drive
that you used to have inside of your car with this,
And basically, tricks in it to thinking it's the USB drive
and then itself has a wireless network
that you can connect to.
And that's really kind of the cool thing.
It also can connect over Bluetooth and it can connect
to your home wifi network.
So in order to set it up, what you do is you
pop it in your car, you take the little USB cable,
it comes with, this is a micro USB cable,
which I'm not a huge fan of.
You pop this, you know, the, the full size USBA
side into your car. I happen to have a little USB adapter,
little USB hub that I use because they only gave you two
ports and you need more than that.
You pop that in one in there and then the other end into
the roadie and , and you're good to go.
Bob's your uncle.
Now there's a QR code on the back.
So when you set it up in your phone, you scan that
and it'll connect to it.
This direct connection is then how you can view footage.
Now the interface in the app is decent for now,
it's very early stages
and I think it's just one guy working on this.
So for what he's been able to do, tremendous job
but it definitely could use some work and I imagine we'll
have future software updates to the app which is available
on iOS and Android.
So you know, it's, it's available, it's out there for you.
And so when you connect directly to it,
my experience was it was really buggy,
it didn't really work.
The footage was just too big, I think for it to actually
download and I couldn't really even view the footage at all
using this method.
So the next step, the next way to do it that I recommend
and that it supports
is for the roadie to connect to your mobile hotspot.
So what you do is you go into your phone,
you turn on your mobile hotspot, whether that's Android
or iOS, and then you have the roadie.
You go into the roadie app and set it up to connect to it.
Now I will say that in doing so,
it doesn't pop open a dropdown of wifi networks.
It sees, it's just not very intuitive.
It's very kind of manual and hands on at this point.
So you have to manually type in all of those things
and hope they match.
And then once you get that done, it connects
and now it's usable. Now through your phone's hotspot,
the roadie can send the footage in a, in a way that's usable
that you can actually kind of scrub through
and see what's happening.
And it's really good. It has all the cameras there
and you can just browse through the clips
and I think it's very well done.
The third way to use the roadie is to have it connect
to a wifi network.
So if you're at home, your home wifi network, put your phone
on that same wifi network, open the roadie app,
and you're good to go. You should be able to browse things.
This in my experience was the fastest where I was able
to transfer the footage the quickest.
And I was able to scrub through it in a much
more reasonable way.
Like I said, so the, the original kind of just Bluetooth
connection did not work barely at all.
I could not even get it to function. And then the second way
where it connected to my phone's hotspot worked good
and the one at the home network worked the best.
So I think it's very early days for roadie.
It's buggy at this point, but it's pretty awesome.
And at this point it makes sentry mode usable
where all those false positives, you might actually take an
extra two minutes to scan. Literally you pop open your
mobile hotspot, you open the roadie app
and you can scan through it in just a few minutes.
So that is where I think this is valuable.
So currently it's sold out
and there's two versions of 64 gig and 128 gig.
With the different prices I'll put on the screen here,
they kind of fluctuate a little bit, so you know,
check it out, at the link down below.
But the question for you I think is whether
or not it's worth it. So for me, I'm a tinkerer.
I'm a DIY kind of person.
Yeah, I think this is super cool. In fact, I was actually
working on one, hold on.
I was legit working on one of my own things.
This is a Jetson Nano which is very similar to the roadie.
You can see that the Jetson Nano has a massive heat sink,
a bunch of different ports including an ethernet port.
So this is a, a much more powerful computer.
You can just kind of see the size comparison here.
But I was actually working on software
for the Jetson Nano to do this.
And the, you know, the thing that I would want in the roadie
that it doesn't have is the next step,
which is what I was really trying to put together here
is some sort of , image recognition where it would actually
scan the images and then determine if there was something
in there. Now that is a lot more challenging
than it sounds because you need a massive training dataset.
And of course you can use something like Google's video ML,
which is what I was testing with
and it works. But then you need a big connection.
Actually have a, a, a little LTE module here that I was
going to connect these two guys with to do that.
But you know, all in, I think the roadie is really cool
if you're a tinker, if you like DIY stuff,
I definitely would get one.
If you are somebody that, you know, you think 200 bucks
to spend or 100 bucks or whatever it is,
when you watch this video is a lot,
then maybe not because I don't think it's fully baked
in terms of just ease of use yet.
It is cool how it's just a couple steps.
Like it's, it's as kind of seamless as it could be,
but I just ran into so many little API issues
and things that I think if you were a regular consumer
and not somebody that's kind of a, a tech head
that likes the tinkering of things, you know, you're afraid
of Linux and things like that,
then it's probably not for you yet.
But my guess is that down the road
the roadie is going to get, you know, a significant upgrade
and , probably be something that's kind of indispensable
and everyone that has has a Tesla.
So that's it for this one.
Guys, if you enjoy reviews of products like these,
then please let me know a really interesting,
cool products that you have.
If you're somebody that makes one check out the about
section for my email where you can send it over.
Because as Tesla evolves, I want to be there to help
really kind of give an objective view of these things.
Roadie didn't send this to me, they didn't pay me anything.
I bought it myself.
And yeah, I mean that, that's what this is.
So, so let me know of any cool products that you guys wanna
see reviewed here on the channel.
And always don't forget when you're free,
the data, your model follow.
I'll see you guys back here in the next year.
(upbeat music)
Thanks for watching the video. I hope you guys enjoyed it.
And if you want to dive deeper and connect with me on a
daily basis and even maybe do some of the research behind
some of these videos, consider joining us
at patreon.com/teslanomics and I hope to see you there.