Skip to content
marcone edited this page May 21, 2019 · 14 revisions

Troubleshooting

If installation went well your rpi should boot up and flash the onboard LED, with either a single or a double blink every second. The double-blink flashing mode indicates the rpi is connected to wi-fi, the single blink flashing mode indicates it is not connected to wi-fi. You may also temporarily see a faster blink sequence during bootup, about 5 blinks per seconds, indicating the device is checking the drive for errors and/or performing a backup. After the fast blink it should go into single or double blink mode again, at which point the rpi should act as a USB drive, and if connected to your car, the car should show the dashcam icon.

If this does not happen, something probably went wrong during setup. Before reporting an issue, please check if any of the following addresses your problem:

  • Wait longer. Headless setup can take a bit of time to complete, since setup needs to download and update a number of packages. Depending on your internet connection, this can take 10 minutes or more. You should be able to ssh into the rpi shortly after it starts booting though, and follow along with setup progress by running tail -f /boot/teslausb-headless-setup.log
  • Plug the rpi into a Windows or Mac PC, to rule out any issues with the car.
  • Try different USB cables, to rule out any cabling issues.
  • Be sure to use the correct port on the rpi: the outermost port on the rpi is for power only, and is labeled as such. You need to use the one that is closest to the center of the circuit board.
  • If you started with plain Raspbian or other image instead of the latest teslausb image, please redo setup from scratch by flashing the latest teslausb image and see if that solves your problem
  • use headless setup instead of manual setup
  • ssh into the rpi and look at the file /boot/teslausb-headless-setup.log. If that file does not end with All done. then something went wrong during the headless setup. Try running sudo /etc/rc.local, which will rerun setup and potentially log more useful messages.
  • check /mutable/archiveloop.log and the output of dmesg for errors.

If you see the LED blinking as it should, the car or a PC sees the USB drive, but archiving is not working, then note that:

  • I only use and test CIFS (Windows-style network sharing). I can't help with other archive methods, sorry.
  • Only saved clips (this includes both manually saved clips and clips saved by Sentry mode) are archived.
  • Archiving starts when the rpi goes from disconnected from wifi to connected to wifi. You will see the LED on the rpi flash rapidly while archiving is in progress. Once archiving is complete it will reconnect the USB drive to the car and won't archive again until it exits and then re-enters wifi range.