Your first smart spool in 5 minutes
Make any filament spool intelligent — free, at home, with things you already own or can get for a few cents.
What you need
Section titled “What you need”- Any NFC smartphone (that’s the reader — it’s already in your pocket)
- A blank NTAG chip — NTAG213, 215 or 216, 25 mm round recommended (a few cents on Amazon, AliExpress or locally; nothing official required)
- Tiger NFC Connect, the free app — download for iOS & Android
Already bought filament from Rosa3D, eSun, Sunlu, R3D…? Your spool may already carry TigerTag chips — skip straight to step 4 and just scan it.
- Install Tiger NFC Connect and open it.
- Tap the “Scan” button. This is where you program your spool.
- Describe your filament — pick the material, the color, the aspect, the weight, and so on. The choices come from the shared catalogue, so your spool will be understood identically by every compatible app.
- Tap “Make” and hold the phone against the chip. A second later, the data is saved on the chip itself — your spool now knows what it is.
- Stick the chip on the spool. For the full experience, use two chips on opposite sides — that’s how factory spools ship (why two?).
The whole gesture, in motion.
That’s it. Re-scan the spool any time, with whichever reader is closest: a tap of any NFC phone, or place it on a reader connected to Tiger Studio Manager (ACR122U / TigerPOD) — the spool introduces itself either way. Everything above works 100 % offline — no account, no cloud, no cost.
Optional: add it to your inventory
Section titled “Optional: add it to your inventory”Want the spool in your synced inventory (visible on desktop, shareable with friends)? Just say so in the app when prompted — it’s an explicit choice, never automatic.
What next?
Section titled “What next?”- Put the spool on a TigerScale and watch its weight update live.
- Open Tiger Studio on your computer and see the same spool there.
- Refilled or re-purposed the spool? Re-encode the chip — Second Life.
Related: Tiger NFC Connect, The TigerTag chip, FAQ