I recently visited the EuroMold trade show in Frankfurt, Germany. This show features products an services for product development, from capturing the first idea, construction and simulation software tools, rapid prototyping, tool construction through to injection molding machines for actual production.

The things I was most impressive by on the show were the 5-axis mills and the 3D-printers. The mills create very complex shapes from metal blocks at an amazing speed, just fascinating to watch. The technology of 3D-printers has come a long way the last couple of years. Just like colour printers have seperate resevoirs, 3D-printers can now create parts from different materials. You can now put a lot of different functions in one part without any assembly, very cool stuff! 

Some other products that I came across and found very interesting:

A company called Protomold can machine one-off parts from plastics. They also make injection molded parts for small series at relatively low cost. At €1700 and up, it's too expensive for hobbyists, but if you think you can find about a 100 people who would also need such a part, it can become a very viable option. Therefore also very interesting for open source hardware projects in my opinion.

Moldware showed off an iPhone application for viewing your Catia 3D-data. I was given a short demonstration of the viewer. It loaded quite big models pretty fast and was really snappy once the parts were on screen. You can rotate the parts any way you like and zoom in and out just like you would with images on the iPhone. They told me they are looking at developing versions for other operating systems like Windows Mobile or Blackberry. The next version will also be able to measure didtances between parts. Looks like a very cool product for people on the go. The product is mentioned on their website, but I couldn't find a download link or buy option. It's also not in the iTunes app-store at the moment of writing, so I presume it will come out soon.

Converting real life parts into virtual data is not always easy. There are now cheap 3D scanning possibilities, but the product that showed an interesting development was RhinoPhoto. It is a plug-in for a 3D software tool called Rhino. You put special stickers (targets) on strategic locations on the object you want to digitize. You then take several pictures of the object from different directions. Upload the pictures into the RhinoPhoto tool, and it calculates the 3D coordinates of the points and creates surfaces through the points! It was a pretty amazing demo to watch.

Just the plug-in costs €900, so it is still aimed at professionals, but expect to see this kind of technology available for a lot less in a couple of years. 

All in all there is a lot happening in the rapid prototyping arena. Technology improves at an amazing speed and prices drop, so it might not be all that long beforeyou have a 3D printer sitting on your desk for a couple of hundred bucks.

If you're interested in visiting the show, have a look on their website. This year it will be held from the 2nd till the 5th of December.