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Dash USB

Turn a Raspberry Pi into a smart USB drive for your GM vehicle's built-in dashcam.
Break the rolling 2-hour limit. Auto-archive everything. Modern web UI.

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Dash USB dashboard


What it does

GM's Surround Vision Recorder (the built-in dashcam on newer EVs and ICE vehicles) records four cameras — front, left, right, rear — to a USB drive you plug into any USB-C port. But it's software-limited to a rolling 2 hours of footage, no matter how big the drive is.

Dash USB defeats that limit:

  • Plugs into your car's USB-C port and pretends to be a compliant FAT32 drive.
  • Continuously snapshots the recordings the car writes — before the car's rolling delete reaches them.
  • Archives clips automatically to your NAS, cloud, or wherever — over WiFi, in the background. Your footage history is limited by your storage, not by GM's firmware.
  • Multi-camera viewer — synchronized 4-camera playback in a modern web UI (interior camera on 2027+ models supported).
  • Privacy-first. No fingerprinting by default; everything sensitive is opt-in.

Dash USB is the GM sibling of Sentry USB (for Tesla), from the Sentry Six project. It's built around a vehicle profile system — support for further brands that record to USB mass storage can be added as data, not code. Not affiliated with General Motors.


Screenshots

Multi-camera viewer
Synchronized four-camera playback of the footage your car recorded, kept as long as you want.

Files
Every recording the car wrote, retained past the 2-hour limit and browsable in place.

Setup Wizard
The 9-step setup wizard. No SSH, no config files.

Settings
Everything reconfigurable from the browser, including Travel Mode for archiving over the vehicle hotspot.


Vehicle requirements

Your vehicle needs GM's Surround Vision Recorder feature (rolling dashcam recording to USB). GM's listed drive requirements — FAT32, ≥64 GB with 32 GB available — are what the virtual drive presents by default.

Hardware

Tier Boards Notes
Recommended Raspberry Pi 4B, Raspberry Pi 5 USB 2.0 OTG — fastest archiving, smoothest UI
Should work Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ USB 2.0 OTG, slower archive speeds

The Pi 3 Model B and B+ will not work. Their single USB channel is wired through an onboard hub chip for Ethernet and the four USB-A ports, leaving the micro-USB port power-only with no OTG. Only the 3A+, which omits that chip, can act as a USB gadget.

Plus a 256 GB+ high-endurance MicroSD card (512 GB recommended — GM records ~5 GB per hour of driving, all of which Dash USB retains) and a USB-C data cable.

Install

On a Pi already running Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit):

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo -i
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Sentry-Six/Dash-USB/main/install-pi.sh | bash

Then open http://dashusb.local in a browser and the setup wizard takes you the rest of the way.


Privacy

By default, Dash USB sends no device identifier to our servers. Here's everything it ever sends:

When What Identifier?
Daily update check Software version, CPU arch, board model None by default
Once per install Empty ping (no body) None — anonymous counter
iOS push pairing (if enabled) Random pairing ID Not tied to hardware

The only way a device fingerprint is sent is if you explicitly opt in to Settings → System → Analytics opt-in (default: off).


Build from source

Prerequisites: Rust stable, Node 20+, and cross (cargo install cross).

# Web UI
cd web && npm ci && npm run build && cd ..
rm -rf crates/sentryusb/static && cp -r web/dist crates/sentryusb/static

# Binaries (aarch64)
cross build --release --target aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu -p sentryusb

See BUILD.md for details.


Based on

A white-label of Sentry-USB-Rusty (Rust rewrite of the original Go Scottmg1/Sentry-USB), itself descended from TeslaUSB by marcone and contributors.

Community

License

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — free for any noncommercial use; commercial use requires a separate license. See LICENSE. Some bundled shell scripts are derived from TeslaUSB and remain under the MIT License; see NOTICE for the file-by-file breakdown.

This is source-available software, not open source — commercial use is not permitted under this license. To inquire about a commercial license, contact the authors.

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Turn a Raspberry Pi into a smart USB drive for your GM vehicle's built-in dashcam — break the rolling 2-hour limit

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