Chamberlain brings the smart home to your garage (pictures)

From the outside, the Chamberlain Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener looks pretty standard.

Like many of Chamberlain's other garage door products, the Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener supports the company's MyQ connected-home platform.

A tiny Wi-Fi logo promises that there's a genuine wireless networking radio built right in.

Though the Wi-Fi Garage Door Openers come in compact boxes, inside is a product with lots of power and potential.

Opening the box is when it hit me that I was in for a bit of work.

You'll need to snap together the metal track that holds the plastic belt drive.

Once you've built the new opener, it's time to take down the old.

If your old opener is bigger, smaller, longer or shorter than the new one, you'll have to adjust the position of your ceiling mounting brackets.

Since the Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener doesn't come with its own mounting brackets, you'll have to use the one already installed.

Don't forget to add some light bulbs to the new opener. There are sockets for two (one on each side).

The model I installed came with a handy backup battery for emergency power.

There are two remotes included with the Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener for mounting on car sun visors.

Each opener comes with one wall-mounted control panel that has an LCD and buttons for lights and door motor. The ambient temperature is displayed as well.

Use the MyQ mobile app to see the real-time status of your garage doors as well as command them to open and close.

Get alerts pushed to you either through email or application notification visible on smartphones, tablets and smartwatches.

The MyQ app lets you schedule windows for alerts or shut them off entirely.

MyQ allows you to add products from other third-party smart-home platforms such as Nest, Wink and someday Apple HomeKit.