Site not showing on Tesla screen

[Tesla-Birne]

Hi. TeslaDashcamWeb works fine. But although I can access the dashcam website on my iMac or iPhone the Tesla webbrowser does not open the site. Timeout. I can ping the car, it is logged in in my home wifi! Any ideas?

Best regards Birne

[Vipercat]

Same issue here....Local DNS server ( in my w2016 domain) resolves the RPI hostname without any issue on all W10 devices and Android Smartphones, but not in the car. Not even via "http://192.168.x.x"

[ppamidimarri]

I had the same issue. Apparently the Tesla browser won't load local IP addresses. The only workaround I found is to make my Pi accessible from the internet, behind an nginx reverse proxy. Then the Tesla browser loads it like any other web site.

[Tesla-Birne]

That sounds difficult. Can you discribe what to do to set up a nginx reverse proxy?

[ppamidimarri]

@Tesla-Birne Yes, it is somewhat complicated. The key steps are:

To make TeslaDashcamWeb accessible in the Tesla Browser

1. On your main router, assign a fixed LAN IP address to a Raspberry Pi. This is a Pi that needs to be at your home and always on. So it cannot be the Pi Zero W that travels with your car.
2. On your main router, forward ports 80 and 443 to that Pi's fixed LAN IP address.
3. Get the Pi running with Raspbian Stretch Lite, then install nginx.
4. Identify your WAN IP address. Let's say it is 123.234.213.012. Try the URL http://123.234.213.012/ from your phone with the phone not on your home WiFi (turn the phone's WiFi off for this test). That way you are trying to reach your reverse proxy server from the internet, not your home network. You should see a "Welcome to nginx" page.
5. On your main router, assign a fixed LAN IP address to the Pi Zero W that you plug into your car. Let's say that is 192.168.1.16.
6. Then edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/default to add a new location block with a proxy_pass line. Details here. Example:

location /dashcam/ {
	proxy_pass http://192.168.1.16:80/;
}

7. Restart nginx.
8. Try accessing http://123.234.213.012/dashcam/ on your phone with WiFi off. The code in 6 simply tells the Pi to pass any requests for /dashcam/ over to the Pi Zero W.
9. If the above test worked, then try it in the car browser. Bookmark the page in the car browser.

Your WAN IP address may be dynamic -- that is at your ISP's discretion. If it is, saving a bookmark with the number will stop working when the ISP gives you a new WAN IP. To get around this, you need to jump through a couple more hoops.

To get around a dynamic WAN IP set up

1. Select a dynamic DNS service. I picked NoIP.com.
2. Create a domain there. Many services let you set up a free subdomain (something like teslabirne.ddns.net at noip.com would be free)
3. On the Pi that stays at home (not the Pi Zero W in the car), install the dynamic update client provided by the dynamic DNS service you picked. This service will ping the service provider once every so often and tell them, "hey, my IP address is x.x.x.x." When the service provider sees a change in the IP address, they change their DNS records so that when you try to reach teslabirne.ddns.net, it will be routed to your new WAN IP.
4. Now try your new URL in the car (e.g. http://teslabirne.ddns.net/dashcam). Bookmark it!

If you decide to do all this, I highly recommend securing your reverse proxy server by forcing SSL on all requests and getting your own SSL certificate. There is a lot of documentation out there on how to secure the nginx server on your Pi.

[stepir]

@ppamidimarri is right - tesla browser won't load local ip