Building a Beepberry to learn the pick and place

When the NeoDen pick and place arrived, we needed something to learn it on. Learning a pick and place is really learning its feeders and its vision: loading tapes, teaching the machine where each part sits, getting it to recognise every package, then doing slow first runs where you watch each placement land. You want to make all of those mistakes on something low stakes, not on a customer's board.

We picked the Beepberry, Beeper's open source handheld. BlackBerry keyboard, a little screen, all the design files published and ready to run. Being open source made it the perfect practice job: a real board with real parts, and nobody waiting on it.

The result was a working Beepberry in a 3D printed case, and more importantly, we knew how to drive the machine before anything that mattered went through it.