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Your first smart spool in 2 minutes

Make any filament spool intelligent — free, at home, with things you already own or can get for a few cents.

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 the form and just tap "Scan".

Steps

You tap the chip twice: once to start, once to write.

  1. Install Tiger NFC Connect and open it.
  2. Tap "Scan" and hold the phone against your blank chip. The app reads it, sees that it is empty, and offers to create a filament for it.
  3. 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. It is a quick form; nothing to type from memory.
  4. Tap "Make", then hold the phone against the chip again. That second tap is the write. A second later the data is on the chip itself — your spool now knows what it is.
  5. Stick the chip on the spool.

The NFC tap, animated — phone meets chip, spool identified

The whole gesture, in motion.

Two chips on one spool — "Dual NFC"

Factory spools carry two chips, on opposite sides, so that a chip is always facing the reader (why two?). You can do the same, in one session:

  1. Scan the first blank chip and fill the form as above.
  2. Before writing, tap the "Dual NFC" button.
  3. Tap "Make" as usual — but now the app asks for the chips one after the other: Make 1/2, then Make 2/2. Both chips end up carrying the same identity.

Always start with the chip you scanned. The chip that opened the creation is the one the app expects as 1/2; the other chip follows as 2/2.

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

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?

  • 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.

▲ Documentation index · Related: Tiger NFC Connect, The TigerTag chip, FAQ