15.1.10. Standalone terminal windows

Tools → Open Terminal opens independent terminal windows – each one a miniature OpenMV IDE session in its own window, with a frame buffer viewer, a histogram, and an interactive terminal, connected over a transport of its choosing. The main window’s connection is unaffected, so a standalone terminal is how a second camera gets watched while the first stays connected, and how a camera on the far side of a network gets debugged at all.

Screenshot needed

figures/open-terminal.png – a standalone terminal window connected to a cam: frame buffer showing an image at top, histogram below it, terminal text area at the bottom with a REPL prompt visible. Capture the whole window.

New Terminal asks for one of three transports:

  • Serial port – any serial port at any baud rate (default 115,200). This covers a second camera’s USB port, a camera wired up over a USB-to-UART bridge, a Bluetooth serial link (which shows up as an ordinary serial port), or any non-OpenMV serial device that needs a terminal.

  • TCP – connect to a server at a chosen host and port, or listen as one on a chosen port.

  • UDP – the same pair of roles, over UDP.

The last ten configurations are remembered and listed in the Open Terminal submenu for one-click reopening later; Clear Menu forgets them.

Unlike the main window’s output-only pane, a standalone terminal is fully interactive: it is a REPL. Typing at the prompt executes Python on the connected camera line by line, with history and tab completion provided by MicroPython itself. The toolbar adds one-click equivalents of the common control sequences – run the current editor script, stop the running script, and soft reset – and the same clear, save, and wrap controls as the main terminal pane.

The frame buffer above the terminal is live too. When the connected camera streams compressed frames in-band – which is what a camera script does when it prints frames through the IDE’s debug protocol over a network socket – the terminal decodes and displays them, and the Record and Zoom buttons work exactly as they do in the main window. That combination is the IDE’s network-debugging story: a camera that exposes its REPL over Wi-Fi gets a full editor-run-preview loop with no USB cable involved.