Some Tesla owners have gone above and beyond to create their own additions to the company’s products, like this Tesla owner in Romania that built a homemade Powerwall. In a new update, one Tesla owner has added a new element to Tesla’s semi-automated ecosystem that makes charging at home even easier.
A Tesla owner has officially built an automatically deploying and retracting vehicle charger in the garage, according to a new YouTube video from Pat Larson (via Reddit).
Using a raspberry pi to run the automated software, the owner built a fully extending charger arm, which effectively plugs into the car automatically before beginning to charge.
The automated system uses the charging port’s blue Tesla logo to center itself, as well as the charging port itself, before fully deploying the charge arm into the charging port. Despite the fact that the arm takes a few moments going back and forth to locate the port, it eventually does find it, and without any intervention from the vehicle’s owner.
Using the Tesla API, the charging arm then communicates with the car to determine how long it’ll be until it’s fully charged, at which point the arm will retract and retreat into its original position up against the wall.
Back in 2015, Tesla teased a ‘snake’ charger prototype, but we have yet to see this device become a reality. The rationale is this automatic charger would juice up self-driving vehicles as they made their away across the U.S. from Supercharger to Supercharger. Check out the video below:
Back in October 2020, CEO Elon Musk said the automatic ‘snake’ charger wasn’t dead yet:
Yes
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 8, 2020
