I’m working on a Python project that needs to communicate with a USB NFC reader device. I decided to use PyUSB library for this task but I’m running into problems on my Windows machine.
Whenever I try to run my code, I get this error:
ValueError: No backend available
I did some debugging and traced the issue. The pyusb library is looking for a file called libusb-1.0.dll in the backend folder but it’s nowhere to be found on my system. I installed the libusb-win32 package thinking it would solve the problem, but that only gave me libusb0.dll instead.
Does anyone know where I can download the correct libusb-1.0.dll file? Or maybe there’s another way to make PyUSB work properly on Windows? I’m using Windows 7 if that matters. Any help would be appreciated!
grab libusb-1.0.dll from github releases. download the win binaries and drop it in your python site-packages/usb/backend/ or system32. it worked for me on win10, should be fine on win7 too.
Hmm, curious - are you running 32-bit or 64-bit Python? That DLL mismatch can be tricky. Also, what version of pyusb did you install? I’m wondering if there’s a version compatibility issue with Win7…
Windows doesn’t come with the libusb backend that PyUSB needs. I ran into this exact issue while building USB communication software for industrial devices. Skip the manual DLL hunting - it’s a pain. Instead, grab libusb from the official libusb-win32 project or download precompiled binaries from the libusb website. Extract the right version (x86 or x64 to match your Python), then drop libusb-1.0.dll into your Python’s DLLs folder or next to your script. You can also add the DLL’s directory to your PATH variable. This keeps everything compatible and prevents conflicts with other USB libraries.