TigerTag

Purpose

TigerTag gives every spool a memory of its own. A small NFC chip holds everything about the filament — brand, material, color, how it likes to be printed — so you never have to guess, label or remember. Tap it with your phone and the spool tells you itself.

Technically, it is the heart of the ecosystem: an open RFID standard, readable by any compatible app or reader — no vendor lock, no secret format.

Where it sits

flowchart LR
  TAG["TigerTag chip<br/>on every spool"] -- "tap" --> CO["Connect"]
  TAG -- "scan" --> RD["TigerPOD / ACR122U"] --> ST["Tiger Studio"]
  CO & ST <--> CLOUD[("Your TigerSystem account<br/>(Firebase)")]
  ST -- "filament data" --> PRN["Printers"]

Features

Standard NTAG213 / 215 / 216 chip (25 mm round recommended), 144-byte open NDEF payload — sized to fit the smallest NTAG213; no keys, no lock-in.
Two chips per spool, on opposite sides — one always faces the reader (printer slot, AMS, phone in hand) and each backs the other up (why).
Identity resolved against the shared reference database.
Writable and rewritable — enables the Second Life workflow; official branded chips ship as NTAG215 so the chip itself can be reused as a plain NDEF object (keychain, business card…) once the spool is empty — never e-waste.
Readable by any NFC smartphone, ACR122U readers and TigerPOD.
A reserved 32-byte area: free for community add-on functions on a standard TigerTag; carries the origin signature on a TigerTag+.

Architecture

See The TigerTag chip for the format summary and TigerTag-RFID-Guide for the canonical byte-level specification.

Interactions

With	How
Tiger NFC Connect	NFC tap: read, encode
Tiger Studio	Reader scan auto-opens the spool; guided chip update
SDKs	Parse / verify / encode from JS or Python
Printers	Indirectly — via the smartphone bridge and Studio’s printer links

In pictures

Naming note: standard chips were formerly sold as “TigerTag Maker” — the name is now simply TigerTag.

Chips without lock-in

More than 2.5 million TigerTag chips have been produced — most integrated at the factory by filament brands (Rosa3D, eSun, Sunlu, Landu, Jamg He, R3D — with Filforme, Nanovia and more being integrated). But the protocol is deliberately not tied to official chips: any cheap, blank NTAG chip bought anywhere (Amazon, AliExpress, locally) works identically, and nothing blocks it. Branded chips help support the R&D; adoption of the protocol is the first reward.

The freedom runs both ways: chips are never write-locked. TigerTag is simply the base protocol filament factories ship spools with — if you prefer another NFC/RFID protocol (custom or existing), you can rewrite the chip and migrate its data to it. Your spool, your chip, your format.