User-centric vs printer-centric

Intelligence serving the user — not just the printer.

Two opposite architectures

flowchart TB
  subgraph M["Printer-centric (manufacturer)"]
    MP[Printer] --> MC[(Vendor cloud)]
    MT[Proprietary tag] --> MP
    MC --> MA[Vendor app]
  end
  subgraph T["User-centric (TigerSystem)"]
    TT[TigerTag chip] --> PH[Any phone]
    TT --> RD[Any NFC reader]
    TT --> PR[Any printer]
    PH & RD --> TC[("Your TigerSystem account — YOURS")]
    TC --> ANY["Any app — Studio, Connect, TigerHub, yours"]
  end

In a printer-centric world the printer is the center: the tag exists to serve the machine, and the data flows into the manufacturer’s silo.

In TigerSystem the user is the center. The user owns:

the filament — any brand, any vendor;
the metadata — material, color, print settings, encoded on a chip they control;
the inventory — stored under their own cloud account, exportable;
the history — weights, locations, usage over time;
the synchronization — the same account feeds every app and device.

TigerSystem simply connects every component together.

Why manufacturers lock RFID

Manufacturer tags are usually cryptographically locked (see the compatibility section for per-vendor details: UID-derived keys, AES-encrypted sectors, RSA signatures). Locking serves the vendor: it ties consumable purchases to the machine and keeps the data pipeline proprietary. It also means your own spool inventory is not yours.

TigerTag chips take the opposite stance: an open NDEF payload on a standard NTAG chip, documented publicly, with open SDKs to read and write it.