Brian Dorey is working on a DIY Pick and Place Machine that look like it is coming along very well. You can see the full build log of the machine on his site here. You can see some information here about the vision system that will be used.
“The component selector is controlled via an Arduino Mini and this interfaces to a Smooth Stepper Ethernet board which is controlled via Mach3 on the Windows PC. The custom app we have written uses a CSV config file of the components to place and this is then converted into the G-Code needed by Mach 3 and also other commands to control the suction relays, LED lighting and camera control and the Arduino powered component selector system.”