For most owners, RVAltCtrl works great entirely on its own; most people can leave this off. But if you already run Home Assistant or another MQTT-based smart-home setup, this feature lets it see and control your RV's systems too, right alongside everything else in your home. This is part of RVAltCtrl's optional Feature Store.
How it works
Point RVAltCtrl at your MQTT broker (host, port, optional TLS, optional username/password) and it publishes your RV's state (battery, tanks, lights, climate, and more) as MQTT topics, and subscribes to a matching set of command topics so those same systems can control your RV back, not just monitor it. Turn on Home Assistant Discovery and those topics show up in Home Assistant automatically, with no manual entity configuration on your end. We fully support the standard Home Assistant MQTT discovery protocol. It's worth naming your RV first, since that name is what shows up as the device name in Home Assistant.
Works with any MQTT system
You don't need Home Assistant to get value here. Turn MQTT on by itself and RVAltCtrl publishes the same battery, tank, light, and climate topics to your broker, ready for any third-party platform, custom script, or dashboard you build yourself to read and act on. Discovery is a Home Assistant-specific convenience; the underlying MQTT topics work the same way for monitoring and controlling your RV from any system that speaks MQTT.
Built for advanced setups
Discovery messages are republished automatically every time the device reconnects to your broker, and there's a manual "Publish Now" button for whenever you want to force a refresh. Everything here is optional and off by default. Turning it on doesn't change how the RVAltCtrl app itself behaves, it just adds a second way to reach the same systems.