WinError 2 While installing smbus package via pip

Question

While Installing smbus The Same error kept occuring which was [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified i am using python 3.7 and i am wondering why this error is occuring to install it i am using the command: py -3.7 -m pip install smbus

does anyone have a fix for the error message ?

Could you please provide the full pip output & traceback (e.g. on a paste site)? — mara004
– mara004, Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 23:23
Please provide enough code so others can better understand or reproduce the problem. — Community
– Community Bot, Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 6:04
@mara004 I read that much. I'm left wondering how they're connecting an i2c LCD to their Windows machine, for instance. Hence my question. — AKX
– AKX, Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 14:21

mara004 · Accepted Answer · 2023-07-19 14:04:19Z

0

To my understanding you simply cannot use smbus on Windows.

The smbus pypi page points to this linux kernel site [^1] as homepage, which then refers to a git repository with a subfolder py-smbus/.

Your linked install log tells us pip calls the package's setup.py, which tries to build a binary extension, which does not work on windows since the referenced C extension smbusmodule.c requires linux headers rsp. linux-only libraries (i2c).

Why did you want to install smbus on Windows in the first place? Are you sure you have the right package name? Or is it a dependency of some other library/tool you want to use? smbus itself seems to be something very low-level and barely documented, and has received very few commits for almost a decade.

[^1]: which BTW is marked as obsolete

edited Jul 19, 2023 at 14:04

answered Jul 19, 2023 at 12:35

mara004

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3 Comments

Seán Moran Over a year ago

There's a library I was trying to use called LiquidCrsyal i2c, which needed smbus to run, I thought at the time it was for windows as I couldn't find anywhere that declared the os that it's for. Is there any alternative library that works with communication with an i2c Lcd?

mara004 Over a year ago

Are you referring to github.com/pl31/python-liquidcrystal_i2c? If so, it actually requires pysmbus (a different package, but also imported as smbus), which claims to be a pure python implementation of smbus communication.

mara004 Over a year ago

Wait, though. Looking at pysmbus code, it posix-opens a /dev/... path. That also smells linux only. (Python's posix module is only available on unix-like systems.)

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