HomeLink (Automotive) To Trigger Automation?

Hardware
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I have an older 2009 Nissan Titan. I remembered that it has 3 Buttons on the Review Mirror that are intended to be used to open a Garage Door. I had completely forgotten this function in the truck existed, but now I would like to finally put them to use.

At first I thought that they would work on just your typical rolling Garage Door Remote frequency, maybe some how being able to program them by pointing an existing garage door remote at it to learn the frequency/code… Sorta like you can do with a IR TV Remote.

But apparently it uses some function/service called HomeLink. I did a short amount of research on this service, but came up more confused. Being my vehicle is older (I bought it with my enlistment bonus back in 2009, it only has 32,000ish miles on it - in case anyone was wondering "why doesn’t this fella just upgrade to a new truck…lol…any hoot)… Being my vehicle is older, all the information I was able to come across seems to be for they upraded/updated versions of this HomeLink; with most likely more advanced Security protocols and whatever. “Security+ 2.0” was mentioned in several documents read, but that came long after my vehicle was manufactured, and there is no possible way it could have been updated on the vehicle since then.

I thought maybe I could just get a basic Universal Garage Door Opener/Receiver of sorts, one that would communicate with this older version of HomeLink. Then wire it some how to maybe a ESP32. Using the ESP32 on the Home Assistant side of things.

Only concern is, I’m not entirely sure what to look for in a specific garage door opener/receiver. I tried to do a google search using the keywords “HomeLink Universal blah blah” but then just got left lost in the many useless Google Search Results for product pages that seem to make no mention of HomeLink, or for pages that mention things like LM850, LM137, LM173, and so on… but have no earthly idea what all that means. (We’ve never had an actual garage door opener… we concerted the garage many years ago into a workshop, and the garage door is just manual - hence why in over the 10 years since buying the truck I never used this HomeLink feature. lol)

Anyways, I guess I was just hoping somewhere out there in sea of Home Assistant masters and hobbyist that someone had the same crazy idea to do the same thing, and might know what is needed to achieve this…

My intention in the end, is to be able to program the 3 buttons in my truck to turn on different things. One being the flood lights over looking the driveway. My truck is lifted by 6in, and has 0% Tint all the way around. It can be hard to back in late at night, trying to squeeze between the wires vehicle and the bricks lining the drive way. Two maybe unlock my front door. Though I’m not sure I’m 100% set on this due to possible security concerns. Three disabling/pausing motion recording/notifications from the 3 cameras that have an angle on the drive way. It can get super annoying when pulling into the drive, and my phone gets about 9 notifications all at once (1 for passing the “Crossing Link” 1 for Vehicle Smart Detection, 1 for Motion Detection from 3 different cameras)

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I have a solution that will improve your visibility whilst drastically decreasing the risk you cause to other road users.

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So, didn’t think to check this before… but I grabbed the Users Manual from the glove box to see if it had a list of compatible “HomeLink” devices supported by my truck… Well it doesn’t, but it does mention the following…

HomeLinkT Universal Transceiver:
● Will operate most Radio Frequency (RF) devices such as garage doors, gates, home and office lighting, entry door locks and se- curity systems.

Then goes into instruction on how I thinking it could be programmed (like a TV Remote)…

  1. Position the end of the hand-held transmitter 1 - 3 inches (26 - 76 mm) away from the HomeLink surface.

So does that mean I could just find a basic RF receiver? I’ve seen a couple on Amazon, which appear to have an RF Received connected to a couple relays, and come with some very cheap looking key fobs (A & B buttons)… Would something like this just work too :thinking:

Maybe mines so old it doesn’t have any sort of “Security+ v0.0.1” :laughing:

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Right, but that’s not the intent of the post. But to respond to your clear “solution.” I have a medical prescription for the Tint. And I’ve been driving with the tint for over 10 years with 0 Accidents.

At night, I roll down the windows when operating in reverse, to use the very large Tow Mirror.

Like noted, not what this post is about. Perhaps keep the snarky comments/opinions on reddit or that TikTok app that 12 year olds are using these days.

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It should do: if you can find any sort of switching device that works from the remote that you can connect to, you could use a simple ESP device flashed with ESPHome for an easy link into HA.

Noted. As a keen cyclist and road safety advocate, the use of dark tints is a bit of a trigger for me. People driving cars often have enough trouble watching the road without additional restrictions.

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