Rapid Ready Roundup: NIST, Ink, Photography and Pacific Rim

In the course of my diligent efforts to keep you good people up to date on the state of additive manufacturing (AM), I come across many interesting news items. I’ll gather them up every so often and present them in a Rapid Ready Roundup (like this one). You can find the last Roundup here.

We’ll start today’s Roundup with an announcement from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In response to concerns the US might be falling behind in advanced manufacturing technology, NIST has issued a $4 million grants notice. The grants will be offered in chunks between $250,000 and $500,000 to organizations that are “… focused on developing advanced technologies to address major technical problems that inhibit the growth of advanced manufacturing in the U.S.” More specifically, NIST is looking for the following:

• Address major technological and related barriers that inhibit the growth of advanced manufacturing in the U.S.

• Identify and prioritize research projects supporting long-term industrial research needs and a range of activities including, but not limited to, creating new or updating existing industry-led, shared-vision technology roadmaps for the development of technologies underpinning next-generation and/or transformational innovations.

• Undertake other activities designed to establish and strengthen new and existing industry-led, multi-partner consortia that catalyze technology infrastructure and American excellence in advanced manufacturing.

Moving on, how many times have you wished you could replace an empty standard printer ink cartridge without paying a premium? UK company, Ink Factory, might have a solution for you. Using a MakerBot Replicator 2, Ink Factory has 3D printed a 2D print cartridge. Does this really represent a potential savings? Probably not, but it is possible someone could expand on the design so you’d have reusable cartridges that could be easily refilled with ink.

Next, in a similar vein, a new set of plans on Instructables offers the possibility of building an SLR camera, minus the lens, via AM. A French student named Léo Marius designed a printed a fully working analog camera for his graduation project. Maybe next he’ll work on a 3D printed 3D scanner and the circle will be complete. From the site:

 The OpenReflex is an Open-Source analog camera with a mirror Viewfinder and an awesome finger activated mechanic shutter (running