carson

Overview
Installation
Authentication
States And Commands
Examples
Streaming

Overview

carson is a simple Python interface for Tesla's unofficial JSON API and includes some utilities to work with data it generates. Lots of work to discover and document the API was done by Tim Dorr and dozens of contributors to his tesla-api project as well as Mark Seminatore and TeslaJS. So, thanks to them for the head start.

Among the goals for this project is to have an asyncio based library. As a result, Python 2 is not supported. In fact, it seems like it has been a decade since the provisional tag was removed from the asyncio library because it has evolved so much. There are many guides, articles, and posts based on early features of asyncio. The best way to stay up to date is by starting with Python's standard library documentation for asyncio.

Dependencies

There is one dependency for basic usage — aiohttp.

Installation

As with most python projects, you should create an isolated python environment. The following example will use Python's venv module. But you can use any virtual environment manager you wish (e.g. pipenv, poetry, virtualenv, conda).

Windows

python3.exe -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
python -m pip install "carson[jwt]"
carson --version
carson/1.2.1+0d5c31d

Linux/Mac

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install "carson[jwt]"
carson --version
carson/1.2.1+0d5c31d

For command line usage, carson can be invoked either as a Python module python -m carson or as a script (simply named carson) which gets created during installation. Both invoke the same entry point essentially making the following two statements the same.

python -m carson --version

is equivalent to

carson --version

Authentication

This project is BYOT (bring your own token) only. OAuth and authentication flows are not goals of this project. There are many apps and utilities that provide this if you need help creating access and/or refresh tokens to use Tesla's API.

At a minimum, an access token is required. This can be set with the environment variable named CARSON_ACCESS_TOKEN or passed to the carson.Session constructor. Values passed as arguments take priority over environment variables.

If you want carson to refresh expired access tokens, you will also need to supply a valid refresh token that matches the supplied access token. Likewise, this can be set as an environment variable CARSON_REFRESH_TOKEN or passed to the carson.Session constructor.

You can register a callable (e.g. function, lambda, callable object, etc.) to be invoked when tokens have refreshed. This callable should take one positional argument which will be a dict and contain the tokens that have updated.

See docs/examples.md for more examples.

States And Commands

With its most basic usage, you can use carson to get the current state of car with the following:

>>>import asyncio
>>>from carson import Session
>>>async def main():
...    async with Session() as session:
...        car = await session.vehicle
...        print(f'{car.name} is {car.state!r}')

>>>asyncio.run(main())
Dark Nebula is 'asleep'

From the command line, you can invoke carson --list to get a list of vehicles associated with the access token you are using:

$ carson --list
Car #1 Vehicle('Dark Nebula' state='asleep' id=1234567890123456)
Car #2 Vehicle('photon' state='online' id=1234567890123456)

If you have more than one vehicle and want to specify which car to show, you can pass --name to disambiguate which car you want to show.

carson --name photon
Vehicle('photon' state='online' miles=52,809 software='2023.7.30' battery_level=72)

To get a sense of what is happening, you can increase verbosity and see the requests being made.

carson -v --name photon
2023-08-31 11:54:44,615 D carson  Req 1 GET /api/1/vehicles HTTP/1.1 200 OK
2023-08-31 11:54:44,929 D carson  Req 2 GET /api/1/vehicles/1234567890123456/vehicle_data HTTP/1.1 200 OK
2023-08-31 11:54:44,929 I carson  Vehicle('photon' state='online' miles=52,809 software='2023.7.30' battery_level=72)

Further increasing the verbosity will produce more detailed output.

$ carson -vv --name photon
2023-08-31 11:56:52,296 D carson  Req 1 status=200 dur=0:00:00.131960
2023-08-31 11:56:52,297 D carson  GET https://owner-api.teslamotors.com/api/1/vehicles
2023-08-31 11:56:52,297 D carson  < Host: owner-api.teslamotors.com
2023-08-31 11:56:52,297 D carson  < User-Agent: carson/1.2.1+0d5c31d
2023-08-31 11:56:52,297 D carson  < Accept: application/json
2023-08-31 11:56:52,297 D carson  < Authorization: Bearer e***ng
2023-08-31 11:56:52,297 D carson  < Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
2023-08-31 11:56:52,297 D carson
2023-08-31 11:56:52,297 D carson  HTTP 200 OK HttpVersion(major=1, minor=1)
2023-08-31 11:56:52,297 D carson  > x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  > Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  > Vary: Accept
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  > Content-Length: 416
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  > x-envoy-upstream-service-time: 97
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  > x-envoy-upstream-cluster: owner-api
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  > x-frame-options: DENY
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  > x-content-type-options: nosniff
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  > strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  > Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, private, s-max-age=0
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  > Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2023 16:56:52 GMT
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  > Server: envoy
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson
2023-08-31 11:56:52,298 D carson  response={'count': 1, 'response': [{'id': 1234567890123456, 've...
2023-08-31 11:56:52,299 D carson
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson  Req 2 status=200 dur=0:00:00.300726
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson  GET https://owner-api.teslamotors.com/api/1/vehicles/1234567890123456/vehicle_data
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson  < Host: owner-api.teslamotors.com
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson  < User-Agent: carson/1.2.1+0d5c31d
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson  < Accept: application/json
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson  < Authorization: Bearer e***ng
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson  < Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson  HTTP 200 OK HttpVersion(major=1, minor=1)
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson  > x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson  > Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
2023-08-31 11:56:52,600 D carson  > Vary: Accept
2023-08-31 11:56:52,601 D carson  > Content-Length: 7047
2023-08-31 11:56:52,601 D carson  > x-envoy-upstream-service-time: 298
2023-08-31 11:56:52,601 D carson  > x-envoy-upstream-cluster: owner-api-vehicle-data
2023-08-31 11:56:52,601 D carson  > x-frame-options: DENY
2023-08-31 11:56:52,601 D carson  > x-content-type-options: nosniff
2023-08-31 11:56:52,601 D carson  > strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains
2023-08-31 11:56:52,601 D carson  > Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, private, s-max-age=0
2023-08-31 11:56:52,601 D carson  > Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2023 16:56:52 GMT
2023-08-31 11:56:52,601 D carson  > Server: envoy
2023-08-31 11:56:52,601 D carson
2023-08-31 11:56:52,601 D carson  response={'response': {'id': 1234567890123456, 'user_id': 123456...
2023-08-31 11:56:52,602 D carson
2023-08-31 11:56:52,602 I carson  Vehicle('photon' state='online' miles=52,809 software='2023.7.30' battery_level=72)

From this point, you can imagine any kind of state query or command supported by Tesla's API can be queried or invoked.

carson --command wake_up
carson --command door_lock

Note: In the case of waking up a car, the command line carson --command wake_up is effectively the same as as the short hand carson --wake-up command.

Pythonic Features

Python is a fantastic language. One of my favorite features is its ability to customize attribute access. That ability allows a Vehicle class instance to basically act like a chameleon. As Tesla changes its data structure and command interface for its cars, it's pretty easy for a Python class to essentially keep itself up to date.

Recursive Dot-Notation

Consider this JSON response from Tesla when getting making a call to vehicle_data:

{
  "response": {
    "id": 98765432109876543,
    "vehicle_id": 1234567890,
    "display_name": "Dark Nebula",
    "state": "online",
    ...
    "vehicle_state": {
      "api_version": 7,
      ...
      "sentry_mode": false,
      "sentry_mode_available": true,
      "smart_summon_available": true,
      "software_update": {
        "download_perc": 0.85279,
        "expected_duration_sec": 2700,
        "install_perc": 0,
        ...

With carson, after you make the call to get the vehicle data, you can access the JSON response that is returned, or simply reference its associated JSON path on the instance of Vehicle using standard Python dot-notation like this:

car = await my_session.vehicles('Dark Nebula')
json_response = await car.vehicle_data()

# I have options here.  I can access the JSON data as a normal Python `dict`
perc = json_response['vehicle_state']['software_update']['download_perc']

# Or as a Python attribute
perc = car.vehicle_state.software_update.download_perc

if 0 < perc < 1:
    print(f'Downloading: {perc:.2%} complete.')
else:
    print('Download complete' if perc == 1 else 'N/A')

Endpoint Commands As `await`able Attributes

Similarly, commands can that are mapped to an endpoint accessed via Python's class instance attribute mechanism will return an awaitable coroutine. For example, the Vehicle class in carson does not have an attribute named start_charge. The endpoints mapping, however, does map START_CHARGE to a POST request to the URI api/1/vehicles/{vehicle_id}/command/charge_start. This makes it possible to start charging your Tesla with either this code:

car = await my_session.vehicles('Dark Nebula')
await car.start_charge()

or this command

> carson -v --command start_charge
2020-01-01 11:51:44,349 D carson  Req# 1:  Method=GET url='https://owner-api.teslamotors.com/api/1/vehicles' status=200 duration=0:00:02.460019
2020-01-01 11:51:44,350 I carson  Vehicle('Dark Nebula' state='online')
2020-01-01 11:51:44,350 I carson  Performing 'start_charge'...
2020-01-01 11:51:44,753 D carson  Req# 2:  Method=POST url='https://owner-api.teslamotors.com/api/1/vehicles/1234567890123456/command/charge_start' status=200 duration=0:00:00.403062
2020-01-01 11:51:44,754 I carson  Result=
{'carsonRequest': {'method': 'POST',
                   'url': 'https://owner-api.teslamotors.com/api/1/vehicles/1234567890123456/command/charge_start'},
 'carsonTimestamp': '2020-01-01T17:51:44.350726',
 'error': None,
 'error_description': '',
 'response': {'reason': 'complete', 'result': True},
 'status': 200}

Examples

See the docs directory for more examples and advanced usage:

carson
Release 1.2.4

Release 1.2.4

1.2.4

1.2.2

1.1.2

1.0.13b1.dev0

1.1.post12.dev268435455

1.1.post12.dev0

1.0.11

1.0.10

1.0.9

1.0.8

Documentation