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I'm a dev new to raspberry pi helping someone out with their RPi project.

We have some basic code controlling an i2c bus via the smbus library and it runs fine on the RPi, but he'd like to get the code running on his Windows laptop just to see it running without errors there.

I'm not sure if this is possible, since I have an error on this line from inside the smbus2 module:

self.fd = os.open("/dev/i2c-{}".format(bus), os.O_RDWR)

The problem is that we're trying to run this on a Windows machine....there's no such things as /dev on Windows.

Am I trying to do something impossible here, essentially making Linux-specific code compile error-free on Windows? I can comment this line out and have it compile without errors, but this feels moderately pointless.

How do you normally develop for the pi on Windows?

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  • 1
    Not Pi specific. The question is how do you develop non Windows apps on Windows,
    – joan
    Jan 6 '17 at 9:06
  • Yeah I was debating where to post it. But I'm basically asking if there's any established common workflow for Windows users creating Pi apps. For all I knew there was some under-the-radar IDE...
    – temporary_user_name
    Jan 6 '17 at 9:49
  • @Aerovistae No IDE will magically create a /dev filesystem on Windows, you need a Linux kernel for that.
    – Dmitry Grigoryev
    Jan 18 '17 at 17:52
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But I'm not sure if this is possible.

Correct, it isn't. There's no Windows compatible version of the SMBus module.

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  • Could you elaborate slightly? Why is that? The System Management Bus article on wikipedia says SMBus devices are supported by Windows; what am I missing? I thought it was a generic bus spec that had nothing to do with what OS the hardware was running.
    – temporary_user_name
    Jan 6 '17 at 22:17
  • You cannot access the SMbus on Windows from your code. There is no module for smbus for windows for your code. If you were using C, C++ or C# there would be a way, but that is not what you are using.
    – John Keates
    Jan 6 '17 at 22:18
  • I mean, I can call C code from python via cffi; that's not an issue. Why would you say it's possible for C but impossible for python? That's a strange thing to say.
    – temporary_user_name
    Jan 6 '17 at 22:19
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    Why is that? -> Because no one has written one, most likely because until the recent advent of Windows IoT, there would be pretty much no one with any interest in writing I2C/SMBus code in python for Windows. Most computers have such a bus, but it is internal. So as John points out, presumably Windows has an API for this, but it would mostly be used by people writing proprietary drivers for whatever. They aren't going to be doing that in python.
    – goldilocks ♦
    Jan 6 '17 at 22:21

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