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dunnage designs 3D-printable holders for the things in a drawer (a kettle, a stack of plates, a pair of mugs) so they stay put while the drawer is in something that moves. You describe what's in the drawer; it works out how each thing is held and exports a 3MF ready to slice.

Dunnage is the freight word for whatever stops cargo shifting in transit: the blocks, braces and chocks around the load, not the load itself.

Note

dunnage is being built. The first milestone is one real drawer, holding coffee kit, mugs, glasses and crockery, described, laid out and exported to a 3MF that prints on a Bambu P1S in PETG. Until then, the commands and the hosted site below describe what is coming, not what works today.

Why another drawer organiser

Every drawer-insert generator assumes a kitchen that stays still. Put the same drawer in a van, a truck or a boat and the rules change: a fitted tray full of solid wells is heavy, wastes filament, and still lets a mug walk out of it over a cattle grid.

dunnage is built for speed bumps, gravel, rough tracks and off-axis tilt. It is not built for being upside down. It treats two problems separately:

• Holder to drawer: the holder must not slide around the drawer floor.
• Item to holder: the thing must not hop, slide or rotate out of its holder.

And it follows one rule throughout: hold, don't fill. A big item gets a few printed fingers or posts, not a solid block with a hole in it.

How it works

One plan, five steps. You can go back and forth; changing how something is held can move things, and the plan shows that straight away.

	Step	What happens
1	Inventory	List what lives in the drawer and the ways each thing can sit: upright, lying, stacked, on edge.
2	Arrange	Place each thing in the drawer. An agent proposes a layout in task order and writes down why; you drag things about.
3	Hold	Choose how each thing, or a group of things, is held, from a library of methods.
4	Make	Export 3MFs to print, templates to cut ply against, and spec sheets for anything bespoke.
5	Lock	Freeze what you've built. A locked holder never changes, even when dunnage is upgraded, and new layouts design around it.

The drawer file

The source of truth is a plain YAML file you can read, diff and commit. The UI edits it by direct manipulation; an agent edits it from a description. Both are first-class.

format: drawer/0.2
name: Coffee and tableware
printer: p1s

drawer:
  inside: [700, 500, 150]      # width, depth, height in mm

base:
  kind: bare                   # or gridfinity, or pegboard (IKEA UPPDATERA)

layout:
  - id: kettle
    at: [50, 122.5]
    why: Boiling is step one, so it starts the line. Handle to the front.

  - id: plates
    stack: 4
    at: [140, 367]
    why: Largest stack in the back-left corner.

holders:
  - id: kettle-fingers
    method: posts
    holds: [kettle]
    floor: false
    why: The kettle clears the drawer by 5 mm, so four fingers round the base, no floor.

The format is a public contract with its own version, separate from dunnage's. Older files are migrated when they're opened; a file newer than your copy of dunnage is refused rather than guessed at. The full spec and a JSON Schema live in docs/format/.

Holder methods

Method	Holds	Good for
well	A shallow pocket shaped to the item	Mugs, small round things, several items in one tray
posts	A few printed fingers round the base	Kettles, stacks, anything large
slot	Two walls with the item stood on edge	Scales, chopping boards, filter papers
peg	A single peg the item drops over	Pour-overs, rolls of tape
gridfinity	A bin on a Gridfinity baseplate	Drawers that already use the grid
pegboard	Pegs in an IKEA UPPDATERA board	Rearranging without printing anything
ply	A printed template to route plywood against	Heavy items, or holders too big for the bed
custom	A written spec for something bespoke	Everything else

Bases

Each drawer has one base: bare (holders sit on the drawer floor), Gridfinity (a 42 mm grid of whole cells), or IKEA UPPDATERA (the slotted pegboard, held by planar form closure: pegs stop a thing sliding every way and turning).

Using it

In a browser. Open the hosted app, point it at a folder of drawer files, and it reads and writes them in place using the File System Access API. Browsers without it fall back to opening and downloading files.

From the command line. The same core runs in Node, so agents and CI can use it without a browser:

npx dunnage check  drawers/coffee.drawer.yml     # validate a file after editing it
npx dunnage export drawers/coffee.drawer.yml     # write 3MFs and spec sheets

With an agent. Layout is a design problem, not a packing problem (neatness, task order, grouping), so dunnage leaves it to an agent and does the geometry itself: fit, alignment, closing gaps for retention, and export. The agent records its reasons in the file, so every placement explains itself.

From another project. Pin a release by tag:

{ "devDependencies": { "dunnage": "github:XDGFX/dunnage#v0.1.0" } }

Your printer

A printer profile is a small file beside your drawers, not a setting inside dunnage. It mostly says what fits on the bed:

format: printer/0.2
preset: bambu-p1s
bed: [256, 256, 256]

Development

bun install
bun run dev      # the UI, served locally
bun run test     # Vitest, on Bun

Built with TypeScript, Vite, React and three.js. Holder geometry comes from manifold-3d, which runs as WASM in both the browser and Node.

Releases are automatic. A commit that changes behaviour bumps the version in package.json, and CI tags vX.Y.Z on a release commit that carries the built CLI, so installing a tag with npm or Bun needs no build step. Every push to main deploys the hosted app.

Licence

MIT.