I rewired everything, with shorter and neater wires, and made a case to house the electronics. I then mounted it on the wall of my garage, made a spool and connected it to the cable, and it all works now!
View demo video here: https://matthewglasser.org/video?src=car-cable-1.mov
Last night, I connected the stepper motor to the ESP32 and got it running with a manual control button. I also connected the ToF sensor to detect the garage door, but I think I fried is so for now I’m going to make it just based on the Tesla API and I’ll add the garage door sensor back in later.
Most of the hardware has arrived but I’m still waiting on the stepper motor driver & ToF sensor. Today I wired the power for the ESP32, which uses an 18V drill battery stepped down to 5V with a buck converter. The ESP32 now works completely wirelessly and shows whether the charge port is open with the built in LED. Tomorrow I’ll add the stepper motor and ToF sensor when they arrive.
This was actually surprisingly easy.
Some of the hardware was delayed until tomorrow, so today I transferred the temporary python/Flask websocket to the ESP32. The hardest part was decoding the binary that Tesla streams in C instead of python.
I also moved the cloudflare tunnel that connects my domain to the ESP32 off of my laptop and onto an extra computer that’s always on on my wifi so that even when I close my laptop the tunnel stays open.
The data now follows this route:
Car > Tesla Backend > api.matthewglasser.org > cloudflare tunnel (extra computer) > ESP32
Tomorrow the rest of the hardware should (finally) come, and I’ll hook up the other sensors, stepper motor, battery, etc. After I wire & code that I’ll just have to mount the actual cable and pulleys to control the charging cable and the sensors.
I now get updates to my api whenever the charging port opens or closes. It was a pain to set up because Tesla requires so many different encryption keys and I’m running it from my local machine via a Cloudflare tunnel but I got it.
The rest of my hardware should arrive tomorrow so I’ll begin setting up the ESP32 and stepper motor, then adding the ToF sensor to detect the garage door opening. Later, I’ll have to connect the ESP32 to the Tesla api (or try to run the websocket on the ESP32), but that’s the last step.
I began by working on setting up the Tesla API to check when the charging port opens and closes. This has taken a long time as Tesla needs a ton of different verification keys and I wanted to have everything hosted on my domain (matthewglasser.org) instead of using something like ngrok. I got data polling working, but it’s very expensive, and I will have to poll very often, so I’m currently working on switching to Fleet Telemetry, which will stream data constantly for cheaper. This requires even more authenication keys but I think I almost have it.
My plan for tomorrow is to begin working on the hardware to detect the garage door opening and to control the stepper motor to actually move the cable, and then I will hook it up to the Tesla API after the other sensors work because that will be easiest
