Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm 30+ year IT career professional with considerable experience configuring networks. The myQ is great in theory, but get ready to spend a lot of time on the phone with Chamberlain configuring, re-configuring, and re-configuring this device. The network configuration and software is very touchy, requires tweaking and constant reconfiguration. I spent 10+ hours configuring this device, including 3 calls to tech support. At some point, Chamberlain will be paying all their profits in helpdesk support. If that happens, I expect either to see major revisions to the product or them dropping it all together. Here's the skinny: First of all, if you look at the manual and the installation photos it appears that you should install the base receiver/gateway close to the garage door motor head. Even Amazon's product listing shows a guy on a ladder close to the motor head. DON'T do that. Install the gateway/base receiver on the adjacent garage wall leading to your home, as close to your Wi-Fi router as possible. There are two reasons for this: 1) placing it closer to the Wi-Fi router will ensure a better signal to your router (more on this later); 2) more importantly, if the base receiver is too close to the motor head, the motor head will cause radio frequency (RF) interference with the receiver and you won't be able to consistently control your garage door with the phone-app or over the internet using your Chamberlin account. The way the receiver works is that you send a signal to the gateway over the internet, and then it sends an RF signal to open and close your garage door. It took 3 calls to Chamberlain tech support for them to tell me to move the gateway far away from the motor head - once I did - it worked fine. (Prior to that the RF interference did not allow me to program the gateway to control the garage door). Had the documentation been clear I could have saved around 6 hours trying to figure out this part. Network connections: The gateway is very finicky regarding its network connection. The way the intial connection is made is by first pairing the gateway with your iOS or Android smartphone and then sharing your network settings. Once the connection is made you can use the smartphone or a PC connected to your wi-fi network to check the status of the Gateway with the following url: setup.myqdevice.com/about.html I placed my gateway on the wall to my home. My home office is on the other side of the wall and the gateway is literally a couple of feet from my wi-fi access point through the wall. I am able to sit in my garage with my cell phone or laptop and connect just fine. I was able to set my gateway up and it works for a couple of hours - then loses its connection. Get used to watching the lights on the gateway. If you have a solid green light you are good to go. If you have a blue and green flashing light - you've lost your gateway's network settings. When that happens (and it has happened to me many, many times) you have to restore the gateway to factory settings. You do this by holding down on the settings button until you get a blue single light, then press the settings button again one time and you will get a blue flashing light. Occassionally you have to disconnect power and let the flash memory in the unit drain for 10-25 seconds. After you have a blue flashing light, go back into your smartphone, delete the old paired myQ, re-pair with the myQ again after it reappears, and then allow the myQ to share the network settings again. You'll need to get good at doing this because the myQ loses its network connections frequently. (See other commentors who have said the same thing). Despite my myQ being a couple of feet from my wi-fi access point, I had a wi-fi network extender laying around and installed it in my garage next to my myQ (see photos) below. I'm hopeful this will eliminate the lost network connections which is really the whole point of this device. If you are away from home and your garage door is up, and you want to close it, you won't be able to if the myQ has lost its network connection. What Chamberlain really needs to do is improve their documentation, and more importantly they have to improve the network configuration and handshake for the device. The connection should be easier (you should be able to go into the myQ without using your smartphone) and directly connect it to your wi-fi network. For example, you ought to be able to specify the wi-fi router or ip address of the myQ. This could be done with a PC, perhaps over a mini-USB connection. The myQ software (which tells you whether your garage door is up or down) also ought to tell you whether the myQ is connected to the Internet. This can be done by Chamberlain "pinging" your device from their datacenter. Without this, if your myQ is "off-line" - your myQ app may tell you that your garage door is closed when it is really "up". You have no way of really knowing that - because the myQ app will only report to you its last known "state." So, when you came home last night and closed the door it will say "closed," but if the gateway lost its network connection after you left for work and your child forgot to close the door, it will still say "closed" when it is really open. At the end of the day the myQ is only as good as its network connection will allow it to be. Right now, that is pretty shaky. So that is a long way of saying, that will the theory of the myQ is good in principle, in practice the product is flawed and really needs a lot of work to be reliable enough that people feel confident it actually works. P.S. I got to know the Chamberlain helpdesk staff pretty well. I found them to be very nice and pleasant to work with. It seemed clear the level-1 techs I initially talked to really didn’t have what they needed to communicate the technical issues around the device (it took me 3 calls to finally get the RF issue resolved). I felt badly for them, although we joked that it was job security for them too.