Installing Home Assistant on VMWare Player 17

[FriedCheese (Ryan)]

Here’s some extra credit setup info.

Setting Up USB Autoconnect

1. Shut down your HA VM.
2. Navigate to your the folder where your VM lives.
3. Open the vmware.log file in the text editor of your choosing.
4. Search for the USB device you wish to automatically connect to the VM. You should see a line similar to this.
   
   
5. Go back to the folder and edit the VMX file for your VM.
6. At the bottom add this line for the device(s) to auto connect. The name should be the name from the log file. If you need more than one device, just increment the number after ‘device’.

usb.autoConnect.device0 = "name:###name from log file####"

7. Start your VM back up. The devices should auto connect and show up under Settings → System → Hardware → All Hardware

Setting the VM to Start With Windows

• Create a batch file

1. Navigate to your VM folder (really any folder will work).
2. Create a new text file. Name it whatever you’d like, just change the file extension to ‘.bat’
3. Paste the following line.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vmrun.exe" -T player start "###full path to VMX file###" nogui

It should look something like this

(NOTE: I have the VMware folder in my path variable, so I don’t have to list the full directory location; if you haven’t done this or don’t know what it is, just use the text from above)

• Schedule the Batch File to Run at System Start

1. Open Task Scheduler:
   
   
2. From the Action menu, select “Create Basic Task”
   
3. Name it whatever you’d like and click Next.
   
   
4. Select “When the computer starts” as the trigger.
   
   
5. Leave the action set to “Start a program”
   
   
6. In the “Program/script” field, navigate and select the batch file created in the previous section:
   
   
7. Tick the box to open properties and then click finish.
   
   
8. Under security options on the “General” tab, change to “Run whether user is logged on or not”
   
   
9. Go to the Triggers tab. Right click the trigger and select edit. Tick the delay task option and set to 1 minute.
   
   
10. Go to the “Conditions” tab. Untick “Start the task only if the computer in on AC power”
    
    
11. Go to the “Settings” tab. Tick “Run as soon as possible” and untick “Stop the task if it runs longer than:”
    
    
12. Hit OK, then provide your Windows password when prompted.

Reboot and verify that HA starts with Windows.