Developer documentation
Build on TigerSystem: read chips, talk to the cloud, or integrate your own hardware and software. Nothing requires permission — the protocol is open.
What can you build?
Section titled “What can you build?”Reading a TigerTag takes any NFC smartphone, an ACR122U USB reader plugged into a computer, or a DIY device — a simple ESP32 with a PN532 or RC522 reader module (the approach TigerScale uses). Commodity hardware, no proprietary gear. From that one scan, integrate wherever an identity is useful:
- ERP / stock management — connect spool identity and quantities to your company’s existing inventory system.
- Usage tracking — log which material went into which job, machine or customer order.
- Custom dashboards & automation — print-farm monitoring, low-stock alerts, reorder triggers.
- Lending systems — fablabs, schools, makerspaces checking material in and out.
- R&D projects, private or public — an open, rewritable, documented identity carrier to experiment with.
None of these need our apps or our cloud: the chip + an SDK is enough. Add the cloud surface only if you want accounts and sync.
And when your product or app reads and/or writes TigerTags, it can carry the TigerTag Certified mark — a quality label guaranteeing the protocol is perfectly integrated in your ecosystem (reach out through the GitHub organization).
The governance is deliberately two-gated: anyone may implement the protocol and say “compatible with TigerTag” — no permission, ever. Only certified partners (listed in the certified registry) may put the TigerTag name/logo on a product and issue TigerTag+ signatures (TigerTag holds the private key). The trademark gate is marketing; the signature gate is technical; neither restricts the protocol by one line — an uncertified chip works perfectly, it just can’t prove its origin.
Start here
Section titled “Start here”| I want to… | Read |
|---|---|
| See who already built on TigerTag | Third-party integrations |
| Understand the pieces | Architecture overview |
| Know which repo does what | Repositories |
| Read/write TigerTag chips | SDKs |
| Exchange inventories as files | The .ttag format |
| Show a spool’s colour the way every other app does | The material swatch — and its live reference renderer |
| Sync with the user’s cloud inventory | Cloud API & integration |
| Understand the chip payload | The TigerTag chip |
Integration paths
Section titled “Integration paths”
flowchart LR
YOU[Your app / device] -->|"NFC (SDK)"| TAG[TigerTag chip]
YOU -->|"Firebase (documented surface)"| CLOUD[("The shared account database")]
YOU -->|"reference data"| CDN[cdn.tigertag.io]
- Chip-only — parse and encode chips with an SDK. No account, no network.
- Cloud-connected — authenticate the user’s own account and read/write their data within server-side security rules (integration contract).
- Hardware — working examples exist for ESP32/Arduino, Home Assistant and a Spoolman bridge (see the integration repo’s examples).
Conventions
Section titled “Conventions”- Versioning — product releases use SemVer; the chip payload carries its own format version for backward compatibility.
- Naming — self-describing names over encoded/clever ones; no multi-state magic values.
- Colour — a spool’s colour is stored as data, not as a picture, so every surface must turn that data into the same picture: the material swatch convention is normative, and ships with a reference renderer you can check your own implementation against.
- Contributions — each repo has its own guide; docs contributions follow CONTRIBUTING.md here.