Share a design as a package

Available now

A design usually isn't one file. It's a description plus the things it points at — CAD files, drawings, a bill of materials, assembly instructions — often scattered across several places on the internet, any of which can move or disappear.

A package is all of it, collected into one self-contained archive.

If you've used Docker, the analogy is close: a description gets built into a fixed, complete artefact you can hand to someone.

When you'd want one

Handing a design to a workshop. One archive beats a list of links, and it still works when someone's link has rotted.

Working offline. The archive contains everything, so it doesn't matter whether the original sources are reachable — or whether you are online. This is the difference between a design being theoretically available and actually usable in a crisis.

Archiving. Keeping a copy of what a design was at a moment in time, rather than what its various hosts happen to serve today.

Building one

Go to Packages, find the design, and build. OHM fetches the linked files and assembles them into a standard layout — design files, manufacturing files, instructions, and the manifest itself, each in a predictable place, so anyone receiving one knows where to look without being told.

Then download it. You can also download several at once.

What a package fixes in place

A package records exactly which files it contains. Two people with the same package have the same thing — not "the same design, probably, depending on when they downloaded it."

That matters whenever which version is a real question: when a design has been tested, when a workshop is quoting against specific files, or when something has to be reproducible later.

What it can't do

A package can only contain what a design actually links to. If documentation references a file that was never published, or points somewhere no longer reachable, that gap is in the design and the package will reflect it rather than conceal it.