I have hunted this site for a while and cannot find an answer to this one. Any help on this question?
The mirror buttons operate regardless of whether the vehicle is on or off. I can't say whether they're disabled if the alarm sounds, but I can't imagine they don't. This isn't much difference between that and leaving your garage remote clipped to your visor (or stashed in the center console).
This is very bad. If you park on the drive way, you can take the garage remote inside your house but not the homelink. I thought it would not operate without the FOB present. The thief can broke into you car and use the homelink to open the garage door and take all the valuable from the garage. I hope someone could find a way to put a switch to turn off the homelink.
If a thief wants in, he'll get in. I wired my homelink to be on regardless of the car's power. I never carried my garage door openers in with me in the past. If that's the case, keep up the good work and program your homelink buttons to turn on lights.
Or put a switch on your garage door. In fact, I bet your garage door opener already has just such a switch. Tom
Why even program homelink if your garage is filled with junk and you're forced to park outside? But if you do, don't leave any valuables in the garage and keep the door to the house locked at all times.
A couple of thoughts: 1. Take the vehicle's insurance and registration (with your home adress) with you, when parking in dodgy areas. 2. If there's a lockable door between garage and house, get into the habit of locking it when going out. There was an incident last weekend in our area: someone broke into multiple vehicles in a church parking lot (I guess this constitutes "dodgy", LOL), Sunday morning, taking vehicle registration and garage remotes. They subsequently did break in to the homes of many of the victims.
I should take the registration out of mine, but I don't know where to store it. Never know when a cop is gonna ask for it.
OK, next question...Does the memory function of the mirror (if any) remain if power is lost to the mirror? If that is the case, then I will rewire the mirror to be switched but that wont be worth the effort is dumping power to the mirror looses its programming. Anyone have a schematic on this or knows whether there is a battery backup in the mirror? Over the next day or two, I will have the wife lock me in the car and then try to operate the Homelink. I will post the results.
In the US vehicle registration and insurance documents are not very valuable. I had another car rifled through, and they were taken. Neither DMV nor my insurance agent seemed concerned when I went to replace them.
A would-be thief would love to gain entry to your garage. Closing the door behind him, he's invisible and has plenty of time to work on that locked door into your house. If you keep tools there, he doesn't even have to bring his own. I just confirmed that the Homelink works with the car off and the fob nowhere near. It's sometimes convenient to open the garage without starting the car, but it should be tied to fob proximity. Any way this can be accomplished? If there is a single "fob proximity relay," power might be wired through it before the opener mechanism. Less convenient, but maybe easier, would be to move Homelink power to a switched source in the ceiling console. UPDATE: I found this item at http://siennachat.com/forum/index.php?topic=2391.0 wherein someone describes doing the latter in a Toyota Sienna.
Not to sell or anything, but they do have your home address on them, and with a garage door opener and your address in hand, someone could take your stuff while you are gone.
You can easily rewire the homelink so it only works with the ignition on. There are 3 wires feeding into the mirror: White with Black Stripe: Ground (GND) Red: +12 all the time from the Dome light circuit (BAT) Black: +12 only when the ignition is on (IGN) The Homelink functions are normally connected to the red hot-always line which is why they work any time. The black IGN line is used for the electrochromic mirror function. All you have to do is cut the Red wire, tape the end going up into the headliner off, and then splice the mirror's side of it to the Black IGN wire. This way it will only work when the car is on, thus preventing someone from operating it if the car is broken into. I have mine wired like this and it doesn't seem to "forget" the programming, so I suspect this is stored in non-volatile memory. Rather than modify my wiring, I took the mirror apart and did essentially the same thing inside by modifying the PCB a bit. You could also do this mod inside the top console which would be cleaner.
Taking the vehicle's insurance and registration with you is not realistic nor practical. Better to clear your garage of junk so you can actually park in there and get rid of any loose garage remotes. It's much more difficult to steal a 3,000 lb garage remote.
Thanks for the info. This is obviously the best solution. I'm interested to hear if it's easier to mod the wires behind the dome light area.
It's slightly more work to do the mod above the dome light panel, but will be better looking. None of these mods are difficult in my opinion. They could be accomplished with a couple of small wire nuts (gray or blue) and some wire cutters.
