Two years with a terrible RV app, then Claude reverse-engineered it
Lights, AC, generator, leveling, all locked in a poor app. Claude Opus read the APK, cracked the Bluetooth protocol, and now their own Android app, website and Home Assistant setup run the RV.
Done withClaudeSpotted· by HN user AshleyGrant· Oct 15, 2026
Result The patched original app is now the fallback
“I now no longer have to use their terrible app as it reverse engineered the Bluetooth protocol and I can either use the custom-built Android app, website hosted on GitHub Pages, or the Home Assistant app I built using AI.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
The RV came with a BMPro system that controls the lights, air conditioning, generator, leveling and slide-outs through a poor app. They gave the app’s APK to Claude Opus, which reverse engineered the Bluetooth protocol. With AI they built a custom Android app, a website on GitHub Pages and a Home Assistant app, and had Opus patch the original app to fix its bugs and bad UI choices.
How it went
They no longer have to use the original app. Their own apps still have some bugs, but fewer than the original, and the patched app is a fallback.
Try it yourself with Claude
I own [device] and its official app is [problem]. Here's the app's APK: [file]. Work out how the app talks to the device over Bluetooth: list the services, commands and data formats, with your confidence for each. Then build a simple web page that can send the basic commands (on, off, status) using Web Bluetooth, and warn me before any command that could damage the device.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
An old printer stopped working with MacOS 27. Claude wrote new drivers, using its owner as eyes and hands: did grayscale work, did page 1 print at lower DPI, now reload the paper for duplex. Then it printed again.
Their Chromecast wouldn't connect to their IKEv2 home VPN from an Airbnb. Told to fix it, Claude found no way to make the existing VPN apps work, so it wrote a new client. About 20 minutes, plus their certs.
Devialet's official app was abandoned. Claude and Codex reverse engineered the amplifiers' private protocol and built an iOS controller in about a day of work. Without AI, they'd never have started.
A Santa hat, a hidden Bluetooth speaker and a cloned voice reading lines Claude wrote. At Christmas it sorted the kids, and declared a cheeky niece "Slytherin!!!"
Claude writes the story page by page, with the tension planned to peak in the middle, and Gemini draws it in a consistent style. Their kids love them night after night.
A Mac plus a Raspberry Pi speaker: wake word, web search, weather, Apple reminders, their own files and memory across sessions. And you can talk over it mid-reply to interrupt.