My Initial Experience with Home Assistant

Well guys as a smart man said once There is no such thing as free lunch. This is GNU/Linux diy project. Some knowledge is expected. It’s hard to learn subject for a people that are not familiar with it. Using windows doesnt count. This does require time, effort and dedication for learning new things.
If one doesn’t have it, well there are commercial solutions that will surly work out of the box. A lot of things you will find here are hacks. Even unofficial repository is called hacks. :smiley:
Unfortunately this is not a perfect world.

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That line I put is done on the Windows machine that hosts HA. Whether or not you would do the same depends on what VM solution you’re using.

One thing that I did just think about. It could be that the devices are showing up on different ports in HA.

If you go to Settings → System → Hardware, then click the “ALL HARDWARE” button. This will give you a long list of the device as seen by HA (I’m also pretty noob when it comes to *nix, so, only a faint idea what all this is). You should see some entries like these for your USB dongles:

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When you click on them, they will expand and give you a line item for “ID”:

Copy that and use it in Z2M, Z-Wave JS, etc. if you aren’t already.

Z2M is under the add-on configuration tab:

Z-Wave JS UI is from the settings menu in the UI front-end:

I think most default to using the “device path” option. My understanding is that the ID is unique to each device. The device path is subject to change since it’s generated on a first come, first served basis. Basically, if, for whatever reason, my VM loads the Zooz stick first, then the device path for that Sonoff dongle in the pic could shift to “/dev/ttyUSB1” and Z2M would stop working. By using the ID instead, the port that Z2M, etc. connects to should always work unless you change the actual device.

Thanks so much. I’ll give that a shot. I’m using ZHA, does that make any difference in your directions?

I’m also using VMWare Workstation Player as my VM.
Where do you put that line in the Windows OS? Just CMD?

Looks like you can change the ZHA port from the “configuration” option for the integration.

That line was added to the VMX file for the VM. Shit down the HA VM. Go to the folder that you setup for the VM. There should be a single VMX file. Right click on it and edit with Notepad. Add that line to the bottom. One caveat, if you don’t use the Sonoff dongle, then you may need to edit the line to the manufacturer that shows up for your device.

Thanks, I’ll give that a shot. My solution is a little more complicated by the fact that I’ve got the Nortek GoControl unit that seems to be the same device name for both…

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At the time I thought it was great that they would provide both ZWave and Zigbee but now I’m kind of regretting that choice…

They’re different. “if00” vs “if01” towards the end.

Just saw that, thank you! I’ll give the new path a try.

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I got the device paths put in as you suggested and it seems to be working OK.

What was the purpose of putting in the Silicon labs in the VM file?

Just to make sure that the USB devices are always passed through. I had issues with them disconnecting when the VM would restart.

OK Cool. Since my devices look like Silicon Labs as well, would the exact line you put originally work for me as well?

Probably, maybe. The line is dependent on how Windows sees them. I’d presume it would show the same as HA and should work. Easy enough to test and just remove the line if not.

Ya, I added it to the vmx file and the VM wouldn’t even boot up, said the file was corrupted. This was with putting it right at the bottom just as you typed it.

Well that’s a bummer. You opened the file after the VM powered down, yeah?

Yep, shut down the VM, even closed out the VMWare program and then edited the file, no luck…
I’ll keep giving it a try though.

How did you get around having the unplug / replug the usb dongle when the machine restarted?

By adding that line to the config file

Here’s the VMware article explaining the options. I went with manufacturer name since it was the simplest solution
VMware Knowledge Base

It’s worth noting that I have no other USB.autoconnet lines. You can also open the VMware.log file in the same folder and see if it has anymore error details.

Thanks, I’ll check it out.

Woke up this morning to my windows PC aparently having done a reboot, since my VM was no longer up and running like I left it yesterday. Is there a way to make VMWare start up a VM on windows boot? I know you can do it with Virtualbox, but haven’t been able to find it in VMWare Workstation Player 17

Your can setup a startup script. I think I’ll do a how to when I get some time about setting up VMware for HA in general and post it.

Sorry @DoctorDan for hijacking your post.

I know for someone like me at least, that would be very helpful

I set HA back up from scratch and jotted down the details. I found an existing thread about setting up using VMware so I just added a post to it.

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