Homelink used to work, doesn't anymore

[rklau]

Wondering if anyone has thoughts -- spent time on the phone w/Tesla, they promised a follow-up but never called back. I have a 2015 Model S; I've used Homelink on the car in two different homes, without a problem. Starting around the beginning of the year, it stopped operating our Liftmaster MyQ garage door opener. We bought my wife a new car about a month ago (Lincoln Navigator), and it worked perfectly on the first try.

I've deleted the Homelink entry for my house on the Model S, tried reprogramming the Homelink module several times -- each time it says it's completed, but I put the opener in learn mode, and nothing happens.

Any ideas for how to further troubleshoot this?

 

[sillydriver]

I have a 2015 MS where homelink has begun to misbehave this year. I think the gps has been turning on the homelink indicator too far from the garage. When I wait until I’m one to two car lengths in front of the garage door before activating homelink it works consistently.

 

[DanCar]

Did something change with your liftmaster? Did you change the light bulbs to led? Mine got poor range when I did that.

 

[murphyS90D]

I had a lot of trouble getting two garage door openers, two cars with Homelink, Three remote controls and an MyQ Garage Hub to work together. The only way I got it to work was clearing the memories in both garage door openers and both cars and the MyQ hub and starting over from scratch. I did the Tesla last.

 

[RDoc]

FWIW, our Homelink has started working properly again after being flaky for the last year or so. It used to work on returning, but fail about 30% of the time on leaving.

 

[jelloslug]

The homelink performance in my car is very spotty. Sometimes it will work hundreds of feet away and sometimes I almost have to run into the garage door before it will respond. I am using it manually also. As a side note: I sometimes have the same issue in my wife's Toyota so I really feel like it's outside interference.

 

[mmmk]

I have a late 2016 Ms 75D. Homelink has been a nuisance from day 1. The transmitter in the car is spotty at best, just like the state management of the door. My door opener I keep in the center console can trigger the door almost near the end of my driveway. The car can not trigger the door when it's within 2 ft of it unless the front of the vehicle is pointed at the door. Since I like to back in this sucks.

This past week I finally had enough of this garbage and disabled the homelink stuff. I was backing in and it tried shutting the door to the garage when the car was not even half way into the door opening. The next day I came home and my car went to 'open' an already open door and it started to close on my GF and her car. We have the trip sensors installed with the lift master and that's the only reason this gimmick didn't close the garage door on both our cars.

If this feature has ever worked reliably I've never seen it.

 

[jerry33]

Mine has been fairly reliable since new (misses maybe 3% of the time, this hasn't changed in five years). Since the auto open upgrade, I found that driving slowly to active the opening works best. Driving fast doesn't keep the Homelink connection up so the door stops after opening about 10-20 cm, once open about 50 cm speed doesn't matter. I don't use the auto close since I park outside and want the door open.

 

[rklau]

I *did* change bulbs to LED, will try swapping them out to see if that changes anything. Never occurred to me that that could cause an issue! (Weird that it would continue to work with the remotes & other cars, but can't hurt to try...)

I haven't changed anything else about the garage door. And I'm unable to get my Model S to open or close the garage door no matter where I am - on the street, on my driveway, in the garage... it went from being mostly reliable to being effectively inoperable.

Will report back after changing bulbs. Thanks for the tip.

 

[alloverx]

Do you have a regular remote that works?

 

[boaterva]

There are several/many threads on this, unfortunately. I had the problem of autoclose never ever worked, Autopen always did. One day I deleted all my driver profiles and recreated them and that fixed it. Go figure. I’d tried every reprogramming etc fix.

 

[bkp_duke]

I *did* change bulbs to LED, will try swapping them out to see if that changes anything. Never occurred to me that that could cause an issue! (Weird that it would continue to work with the remotes & other cars, but can't hurt to try...)

I haven't changed anything else about the garage door. And I'm unable to get my Model S to open or close the garage door no matter where I am - on the street, on my driveway, in the garage... it went from being mostly reliable to being effectively inoperable.

Will report back after changing bulbs. Thanks for the tip.

Had this problem. Swapped "normal" LEDs to ones that the garage door manufacturer stated were "noise free" and that completely fixed any problems getting the car to open the door. I highly recommending finding a set on Amazon. They will cost much more per bulb, but are worth it.

 

[Singularity]

If anyone has good Amazon links, please share. I also have had issues that started when moving to LED bulbs and need to replace.

Here’s Liftmasters’ product bulletin from 2017 with 2 bulbs, and dated compatibility list from 2014 with a bunch more.

 

[bkp_duke]

I installed these:
https://www.amazon.com/Genie-Garage...8-1-spons&keywords=garage+door+led+bulb&psc=1

My neighbor used these with good results:
https://www.amazon.com/Equivalent-U...8-2-spons&keywords=garage+door+led+bulb&psc=1

 

[jeffro01]

Point of reference, I have Chamberlain openers with their "newish" Apple homekit module added and auto-open coming home ALWAYS works without fail and always at the exact same spot, again without fail... Auto-close when leaving still only works about 50% of the time as I still haven't quite figured out what the car is looking for so far as when it triggers it's auto-close behavior. I've also never had any issues with the signal being sent by the car not being received by the opener, 100% success rate from what I can recall there as well.

Given all of the variables out there figured it was worth pointing out my relative lack of issues compared to what some here are seeing...

Jeff

EDIT: Oh and both of my Chamberlain openers have Cree LED bulbs in them.

 

[bkp_duke]

Point of reference, I have Chamberlain openers with their "newish" Apple homekit module added and auto-open coming home ALWAYS works without fail and always at the exact same spot, again without fail... Auto-close when leaving still only works about 50% of the time as I still haven't quite figured out what the car is looking for so far as when it triggers it's auto-close behavior. I've also never had any issues with the signal being sent by the car not being received by the opener, 100% success rate from what I can recall there as well.

Given all of the variables out there figured it was worth pointing out my relative lack of issues compared to what some here are seeing...

Jeff

EDIT: Oh and both of my Chamberlain openers have Cree LED bulbs in them.

So, the "close" problem - are the lights on? The lights are OFF when you are pulling up (auto-open) and therefore not providing any interference, but if the door is open with the lights on already, then they would actively be interfering with the signal.

The above was EXACTLY our problem - auto-open worked just fine because the LED lights were off and not interfering with the open signal. But closing the door was very difficult, because we had opened the door from the wall, and hopped into the car to drive off. Swapping the bulbs fixed this problem.

I did some more extensive range testing after this and found the following:
1) Incandescent bulbs - worked BY FAR the best - up to 80 ft away.
2) Genie LED (special) bulbs - worked second best - up to 65 ft away.
3) CFL bulbs - worked consistently, but had to be close - up to 20 ft away.
4) Generic LED (walmart) bulbs - horrible - only worked RIGHT UP at the door, 3-5 ft away.

 

[jeffro01]

So, the "close" problem - are the lights on? The lights are OFF when you are pulling up (auto-open) and therefore not providing any interference, but if the door is open with the lights on already, then they would actively be interfering with the signal.

The above was EXACTLY our problem - auto-open worked just fine because the LED lights were off and not interfering with the open signal. But closing the door was very difficult, because we had opened the door from the wall, and hopped into the car to drive off. Swapping the bulbs fixed this problem.

I did some more extensive range testing after this and found the following:
1) Incandescent bulbs - worked BY FAR the best - up to 80 ft away.
2) Genie LED (special) bulbs - worked second best - up to 65 ft away.
3) CFL bulbs - worked consistently, but had to be close - up to 20 ft away.
4) Generic LED (walmart) bulbs - horrible - only worked RIGHT UP at the door, 3-5 ft away.

To be clear since I think I added some confusion with my OP, any signals sent by my car has never failed to be received by my opener(s). My ONLY issue is about 50% of the time when I'm leaving home, whatever the software is using to judge that I'm leaving home doesn't trigger the pop up on the MCU which therefore means the car never sends the signal.

Jeff

 

[bkp_duke]

To be clear since I think I added some confusion with my OP, any signals sent by my car has never failed to be received by my opener(s). My ONLY issue is about 50% of the time when I'm leaving home, whatever the software is using to judge that I'm leaving home doesn't trigger the pop up on the MCU which therefore means the car never sends the signal.

Jeff

That the GPS. I've noted some substantial GPS "drift" on both our cars. I.e. the map shows the car several feet off from where it was parked in the garage. Probably a byproduct of the car getting a partial signal through the garage and having a much larger error radius.

I gave up a long time ago on auto-close.