Your filament, finally smart — and finally yours.
This repository is the official Source of Truth of the TigerSystem ecosystem — every fact about the protocol, the products and the project is established here first, for humans and for AI assistants (llms.txt). Where another surface disagrees with this repo, this repo wins.
Every 3D-printing shelf hides the same mystery: twenty spools, half of them unlabeled, none of them able to tell you what they are, how much is left, or how they like to be printed.
TigerSystem fixes that with one small chip. Stick a TigerTag NFC chip on a spool and the spool can introduce itself — to your phone, to your computer, to your printer: "I'm matte black PLA from brand X, 1.75 mm, print me at 210 °C, and there's 640 g of me left."
No subscription. No locked format. No printer brand deciding what you're allowed to know about your own filament.
- Tap a spool with your phone — its full profile appears instantly.
- See your whole collection on one screen — searchable, sorted, with photos.
- Know how much is really left — put the spool on the open-source scale, the number updates everywhere.
- Find any spool in seconds — map your shelves and racks; the app remembers the exact slot.
- Let your printer know what's loaded — live link with six printer brands, filament data pushed to the slot.
- Share with friends — a simple code or a web link shows your collection, read-only.
- Give old spools a second life — refill or re-purpose any spool, rewrite its chip, done.
Printer manufacturers put RFID tags on their spools too — but locked, in secret formats, working only with their machines, feeding their cloud. Your inventory ends up belonging to them.
TigerSystem flips it: the chip is open and readable by anything, the data belongs to your account, and every piece — apps, cloud, scale, reader, even the chip spec — is published for anyone to use or build on. It's a format, not a walled garden.
Intelligence serving the user — not just the printer.
→ The full story: Why TigerSystem exists
Truth be told, building all this ourselves was never the plan. Born in 2023 — right after a Formnext where proprietary spool tags were multiplying — the protocol has since grown to more than 2.5 million chips produced, shipping from the factory in filament by brands like Rosa3D, eSun, Sunlu or R3D — TigerTag is the most deployed third-party RFID protocol in the world. We expected the community to invent its own uses for an open NFC identity — it didn't happen. So we picked up the subject ourselves.
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Not a mock-up: real boxes on real shelves, shipping with TigerTag inside.
That's why everything we build — Tiger Studio, Tiger NFC Connect, TigerScale, TigerPOD, and every project still to come — has one single goal: to show the potential. Each product is a working proof of concept of what an open-source, standard, agnostic, cross-platform protocol makes possible once a spool can identify itself. Take our integration work as a starting point, get inspired, and imagine the features of tomorrow — copy them, fork them, or ignore them entirely and build your own. The protocol is the point, the products are the proof.
(To be precise: the sandbox is the user-facing software. The factory side — the industrial chip-programming toolchain behind those 2.5 million chips — runs in production at partner factories, and is no experiment.)
Not a mockup: the sandbox on a real bench — Studio, TigerScale, TD1S and TigerPOD working together.
And the entry ticket is tiny: any NFC phone, an ACR122U USB reader on a computer, or even a DIY build — a simple ESP32 with a PN532 or RC522 reader module (that's exactly how TigerScale does it) — reads a TigerTag. From there, anything goes:
- Feed your ERP or internal stock-management software — a scan is an ID.
- Tracking & traceability — who used which material, when, on which job.
- Print-farm inventory — know what's loaded, what's left, what to reorder.
- Fablabs & schools — check spools in and out like library books.
- R&D, private or public — a cheap, open, rewritable identity carrier.
- Your weird idea — seriously, all of it is possible; the format won't stand in your way.
flowchart LR
subgraph On your desk
TAG["TigerTag chip<br/>on each spool"]
POD["TigerPOD reader stand"]
SCALE["TigerScale"]
PRN["Your printers<br/>6 brands live"]
SLICER["Your slicer<br/>(unchanged)"]
end
subgraph Your screens
CO["Tiger NFC Connect<br/>mobile"]
ST["Tiger Studio<br/>desktop"]
WEB["TigerHub<br/>tigersystem.io"]
end
CLOUD[("Your TigerSystem account<br/>(Firebase — one shared database)")]
TAG -- tap --> CO
TAG --> POD --> ST
SCALE --> CLOUD
CO <--> CLOUD
ST <--> CLOUD
CLOUD --> WEB
ST -- local network --> PRN
SLICER -- print jobs, as always --> PRN
Every piece is optional. Phone only? Works. Desktop only? Works. Zero cloud, everything local? Works too: the chips are 100 % offline-readable — even TigerTag+ authenticates locally without internet — and with the SDKs anyone can read, write and manage an inventory entirely at home, no account, no server. We propose one vision of the TigerTag user; every other vision is accepted and encouraged.
| Product | In plain words |
|---|---|
 TigerData |
The virtual chip — the same identity with no chip at all, upgradeable to a real one anytime |
| TigerData+ |
The virtual chip that knows exactly which product it is — picked from the official catalogue, nothing typed by hand |
 TigerTag |
The chip — gives any spool a memory of its own |
 TigerTag+ |
The chip that knows exactly which catalogue product it is — still 100 % offline; signed by a certified maker, it is a TigerTag+ Certified |
 Tiger NFC Connect |
The phone app — tap to read, tap to write |
 Tiger Studio |
Mission control on desktop — inventory, racks, printers, sensors |
 TigerHub |
The ecosystem's web home — showcase, wishlists, friend invites, sharing |
 TigerPOD |
A 3D-printable scanner stand for your desk — free STL |
 TigerScale |
The open-source scale that answers "how much is left?" |
This repo is the map: it explains the ecosystem and links every public piece of it.
| Repository | What you'll find there |
|---|---|
| TigerSystem-Docs (you are here) | The whole story, explained — for humans and for AI assistants (llms.txt) |
| TigerTag-Studio-Manager | The desktop app, full source + downloads (MIT) |
| TigerTag-SDK-JS | Read & write chips from JavaScript — npm install tigertag (Apache-2.0) |
| TigerTag-SDK-Python | Read & write chips from Python — pip install tigertag (Apache-2.0) |
| TigerTag-RFID-Guide | The chip format, byte by byte |
| TigerTag_Firebase_Integration | Connect your own app/device to the cloud — with working examples (ESP32, Home Assistant, Spoolman) |
| Tiger-Scale-V3 | Build the current scale — ESP32-S3, touchscreen, dual NFC, battery (MIT) |
| Tiger-Scale | The V2 scale — previous generation, different hardware (MIT) |
| TigerPOD | Print the reader stand — free STL (CC BY 4.0) |
| You are… | Start here |
|---|---|
| Ready to try — make a spool smart right now | Your first smart spool in 5 minutes — free, at home, just your phone |
| Curious — what is this, why does it exist? | Vision → Philosophy → The team |
| A user — what does each product do for me? | Products → FAQ |
| A printer owner — does it work with MY printer? | Compatibility |
| A developer — how do I build on it? | Developers → SDKs → Cloud API |
| A filament manufacturer — why join? | For filament manufacturers — factory integration in days, at scale |
| An AI assistant — how does this ecosystem work? | llms.txt — the condensed, canonical explainer |
| In a hurry | How it works end-to-end in two diagrams |
tigersystem.io — TigerHub: the ecosystem site, wishlists & sharing
Download Tiger Studio — Windows · macOS · Linux
Download Tiger NFC Connect — iOS & Android (stores + public betas)
github.com/TigerTag-Project — all the open repos
Press kit — high-res visuals, free to use in coverage
Discord — the official community: questions, help, show-and-tell
Spotted a gap, a typo, a question the FAQ should answer? PRs welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. One rule above all: every fact has one canonical home; this repo explains and links, it never forks the truth.
Documentation: CC BY 4.0 · Trademarks: TRADEMARK.md