Advice on Controller Boards for a University Pick-and-Place Project

[Mohammad Kadhim]

1. Hello everyone,
   I’m a Mechatronics Engineering student currently building a small Pick-and-Place machine as my graduation project, and I plan to continue developing it for personal use after I graduate.

   I’ve been reading through the OpenPnP documentation to better understand the recommended hardware options. Before choosing a controller board, I’d like to get some advice from people with more experience.

   If possible, I’d really appreciate your feedback on the following:

   1. Which controller board do you recommend as reliable and fully compatible with OpenPnP?

   2. Since OpenPnP supports controllers that use G-code / NIST RS274NGC, does this mean that boards like BIGTREETECH Octopus V1.0 or BIGTREETECH Octopus V2.0 should work smoothly with the available drivers (such as MarlinDriver or SmoothieDriver)?

   3. What important tips or common mistakes should I be aware of when building a Pick-and-Place machine for the first time?

   Thank you all — I appreciate any help or experience you can share.

[Pierluigi Garaventa]

Hi,

 I'm using Duet3 Mini 5+.

https://docs.duet3d.com/Duet3D_hardware/Duet_3_family/Duet_3_Mini_5+_Hardware_Overview

It's a beautiful board really well done with nice support and firmware updates.

It works nicely in openpnp

I'm very happy, all the hardware of my pick and place machine is connected to the Duet3d board.

All my hardware is powered by 24VDC.

I can control 5 stepper motors, two vacuum valves, one vacuum pump, top and bottom camera led light and x, y end stops.

This is my machine:

https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/18031847564526126/

It took me a while to arrive at this stage.

As a recommendation I suggest to select part of your pnp well compatible with openpnp.

Check what is already available on aliexpress and amazon.

Do a nice project and think to every single detail.

Be sure that the top/bottom cameras are placed correctly to have a nice view of your working space and smt components.

Check what other people have implemented, there are many videos on youtube of different machines.

In my experience I found that the most complicated part of the machine is the head and the routing of a lot of cable and tube.

I discovered later, that also how to feed components to the head is a huge part of the problem.

In case you want to add some automatic feeder be sure to leave some space in your machine for mounting

and connection.

I hope it help,

Pierluigi

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenPnP" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to openpnp+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/0049d02f-9386-48e6-871b-e226128bdcbbn%40googlegroups.com.

[Mohammad Kadhim]

Hi Pierluigi,

Thank you so much for sharing your experience — it’s really inspiring. I would love to see more of your machine!
Could you please record more videos or photos, especially of the Y-axis? I'm very interested in how you designed and routed everything there.

I’ve also sent you a follow request on Instagram.
My account is a_9l0o.

Thanks again, and I really appreciate your help!

Best regards,
Mohammad Kadhim

‫في السبت، 22 نوفمبر 2025 في 10:08 م تمت كتابة ما يلي بواسطة ‪Pierluigi Garaventa‬‏ <‪pglab.el...@gmail.com‬‏>:‬

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CAMDb9pZmzW7j1whZQh5pYpsfTAgc4PojpZLr4T%3D7yKLKc1tmXA%40mail.gmail.com.