What I have noticed is this: when I press the Homelink button on the car and I am too far away from the gate, the gate doesn't open. When I push the Homelink button on the OVMS from too far away, the gate doesn't open either. BUT when I continue driving towards the gate, it then opens without pushing the Homelink button a second time. I am within line of sight of the gate the entire time.

When I try this on my garage door, I push the OVMS button about a hundred yards away from the garage. I am down a hill and around a corner from the garage--completely out of sight. When I turn the bend and crest the hill and am in sight of the garage--20 yards away, the door then opens without pushing the button again. This does not happen when I push the Homelink button in the car that far away. For the garage door to open with the Homelink button on the car, I have to be 20 yards away and in line of sight.

And either way, the garage door can be opened from 20 yards away, but the gate only 5 yards away. A big but consistent difference in distance.

So I don't really have longer range with the OVMS, I can just push the button further away from the gate/garage. But the gate/garage starts opening the same distance from the car whether I use the OVMS or car Homelink button.

The OVMS just seems a lot cooler!

Go figger.

Comments here about OVMS homelink vs VDS homelink are bizarre. The OVMS homelink just sends exactly the same codes as the VDS homelink. The reason I know is because we got the codes by looking at those sent by the VDS. The codes are sent on the CAN bus to the homelink unit, which then just does the transmission.

Perhaps this is a "bug" in OVMS? Perhaps there is a "start homelink" and "stop homelink" code and we're only sending the first one. I'll raise it on the developers forum.

The code descriptions we have are:

Home Link

B1=0x09

B2=0x00

B3=Homelink device (0x00, 0x01 or 0x02)

N.B. mstegen is also seeing another message on the CAN bus just before this message, 0x09 0x02 0x00, not sure if it's important.

markwj suspects perhaps some sort of wakeup message.

Mstegen (or someone else with can-usb and homelink) - can you have a double-check of this. If you press the VDS homelink button, what _exactly_ do we see? Is it 09/02/<device> then 09/00/<device>, or 09/00/<device> then 09/02/<device>? Is there any difference if you hold down the VDS homelink button?