What is comma connect?

⚠️ This wiki is community-maintained. The wiki should NOT be considered "word of comma". Edit suggestions are welcome and encouraged!

connect (connect.comma.ai) is a dashboard of your recent drives. connect allows for watching your past drives, accessing routes, and looking into your driving history. More features are in the paid versions which can be referred to in the image below.

Recordings of your drives will be uploaded to connect where they will be stored for 3 days(for non-subscribers). Subscribe with a comma prime subscription to keep your drives accessible for 1 year.

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A subscription to prime or lite is NOT required to use openpilot in your car

Paid vs Free

Accessing and Managing Your Data

comma hardware, software, and cloud services handle recording of data from your device. This includes video footage and log data. This section is to help you understand how to access and manage that data.

Terms

  • Segments: 1-minute long video and data files of the same timeframe.
  • Data is grouped into "routes" which are a series of segments that are uploaded together. In general, it's every "ignition on" to "ignition off" cycle.

Uploading Info

  • comma's online cloud for accessing your comma device's data including a UI for viewing, uploading, and downloading files.
  • Only official comma.ai devices can upload to comma connect.
  • Low bitrate preview quality video is automatically uploaded to comma connect on Wi-Fi. On cellular, it'll only auto-upload segments that are currently viewed in connect.
  • High bitrate video is uploaded to comma connect when you press the "Upload Video" button for each video segment/minute you are looking at or pressing "Upload All Files" when looking at a series of segments/minutes.
  • If the data doesn't exist on the device, such as being deleted from space pressure, it cannot be uploaded to comma connect.
  • You can download high bitrate video from comma connect that have manually uploaded.
  • "Routes" 3 days old are deleted unless you have Comma Prime, otherwise a year.
  • You can preserve 10 "routes" to keep them from being deleted after the time limit. 100 routes can be preserved with Comma Prime.
  • Setting up SSH/SFTP access to your comma device is not required to use comma connect.
  • Unlimited space in terms of MB/GB/etc. for all users. Primarily limited by time.
  • 3 days of route retention for non-Prime users. 1 year for Prime users.
  • 10 routes preservation limit for non-Prime users. 100 routes preservation for Prime users.
  • Uploads of high resolution data to be retained must be manually initiated by the user. The data must also exist on the device before it can be uploaded.

Device Data

  • Your device, a comma device that records data to its local storage and uploads it to comma connect.
  • Old data is deleted when the device runs out of space, not by time limits like in comma connect.
  • You can access your device's data via SSH and SFTP outside of comma connect.
  • You can download your own data over and store it however you want.
  • Tools such as Openpilot Toolkit for Windows/Android can assist with this.
  • Some custom forks may include built-in webservers.

Data Size Estimate

Files remain on the comma device until they are automatically deleted due to space pressure except for bookmarked segments.

  • 128GB (C3X) stores approximately 7 hours of data/footage
  • 1TB (C3 with 1TB SSD) stores approximately 60 hours of data/footage
  • 250GB (C3 with 250GB SSD) stores approximately 15 hours of data/footage
  • 64GB (Late C3) stores approximately 3 hours of data/footage
  • 32GB (Early C3) stores approximately 2 hours of data/footage

Per minute:

  • 76 MB each for forward/telescopic camera, extended/wide angle camera, and driver camera (if enabled). All in raw HEVC/H.265 files.
  • 12 MB each for low bitrate H.264 encoding forward camera for preview purposes.
  • 3 MB for Full Raw Logs
  • 1 MB for Trimmed Lite Logs

⭐ Thanks to Nelson Chen for writing on Github a lot of great info about connect and how it works! This is originally found on the community wiki on Github.