A CD player, for spools.
The TigerPOD is an open-source desktop NFC / RFID reader and writer (burner) for 3D-printing filament spools, built from two commodity USB readers and a 3D-printed shell. Drop a filament spool in and your computer reads its TigerTag chip — material, brand, colour, temperatures, what's left. Write (encode) a tag the same way: put the spool in, done. No aiming, no hunting for the sticker.
▶ Higher-quality clip: TigerPOD-demo.mp4
Fits ~99% of 1 kg spools, whatever the type — plastic masterspools, cardboard spools, and non-reusable plastic or refill spools all drop right in.
Contents: A first of its kind · Why it exists · Free electronics, free design · A universal NFC station · Ecosystem comparison · Build one · Or buy the kit · The ecosystem · Read a tag in your own code · FAQ · Contributing · Licence
As far as we know, the TigerPOD is the first spool-scale NFC/RFID reader/burner of its kind — nobody had done this before. It was imagined by Benoit Michaut, a French maker who has been passionate about 3D printing since 2015, in 2023, alongside the creation of the open-source TigerTag protocol: take two standard, low-cost USB NFC readers, drop one on each side of a 3D-printed spool holder, and you get a device that reads and writes (burns) both chips of a filament spool at once. No custom PCB, no proprietary reader, no dedicated silicon.
That turns encoding a spool's NFC chips — normally an industrial, closed process — into something anyone can build on their desk for the price of two commodity readers. The goal isn't the gadget, it's democratising RFID for filament through the open TigerTag protocol so any maker, brand, or printer can adopt it freely.
This is the part that matters. The TigerPOD is the first consumer-grade device for material identification in 3D printing — it took a capability that belonged to industry and put it on a desk.
| Before the TigerPOD | After the TigerPOD | |
|---|---|---|
| Who could encode material chips | Large manufacturers only | Anyone, at home |
| What it took | Industrial encoders, proprietary hardware, closed tooling, vendor contracts | Two commodity USB readers and a 3D print |
| Skills required | Specialist | None — no electronics, no soldering |
| Cost | Capital expenditure | The price of two cheap readers |
Today, at home and for very little money, anyone can read a chip, write a new one, change what's already on it, and wipe it clean again. Before this, that technology was reserved for big industry. That shift, not the plastic shell, is what the TigerPOD really is.
And it works for filament, in Dual NFC — both chips of a spool at once — on standard spools of any brand, with any chip technology the ACR122U supports (MIFARE, NTAG and others). Not one vendor's ecosystem: all of them.
(Developers: that's full CRUD — create, read, update, delete — on an NFC tag.)
New to RFID for filament? Start with the TigerTag RFID Guide — the open spec and public registry behind the Pod.
The Pod was first imagined for mass programming at third-party filament factories. The brief was demanding: a way to encode spools that is cheap, easy to build locally, and duplicable in large quantities at the lowest possible cost, without giving up any capability. With commodity readers and a printed shell, the development cost is essentially zero — a Pod can be produced anywhere in the world, locally, in quantity.
The ACR122U is deliberate: it's an extremely common reader, easy to find anywhere for very little money. And there's nothing to learn — no electronics knowledge, no soldering, no difficulty. Print the shell, slide in two readers: a five-year-old could assemble a TigerPOD.
From that factory-floor origin, we then brought the Pod to everyone with the launch of the Tiger Studio Manager desktop app — the same encoding power on any maker's desk, not just a production line.
This is the founding premise of an open-source project that is neutral and agnostic — tied to no printer maker and no filament brand. The point is to put maximum value in everyone's hands and offer a genuinely low-cost path for users everywhere on the planet.
That's also why it works with every NTAG — down to the small NTAG 213: we optimised every byte of the chip to pack the most data into the least space. And because a TigerTag chip is a standard NFC tag, any phone with an NFC reader can read it — so you can read and write TigerTag chips with nothing but a smartphone, no Pod required.
There is no custom silicon in a TigerPOD, and that is the point:
- Two ACR122U-compatible NFC readers — commodity hardware, sold everywhere, by everyone.
- A single 3D-printed shell with two slots — you slide an ACR122U into each side. No assembly, no screws, no wiring.
- A splitter (2× USB-B → 1× USB-C) so the whole thing is one tidy cable.
The three parts we use: two ACR122U-compatible readers + one USB splitter — two readers go in each Pod.
The recommended setup is two NFC chips per spool and two NFC readers — one chip on each side of the spool, one reader facing each chip:
- No aiming. Whichever way you drop the spool in, a chip is always in front of a reader. Nothing to line up.
- Twin Tag stays in sync. With a reader on each side, the Pod reads and writes both chips at once — the pair stays byte-identical, and your inventory counts one spool, not two tags.
A single chip and a single reader still work, but you lose the drop-and-go convenience (you have to present the tagged side) and the automatic Twin Tag sync.
Any NTAG 213 / 215 / 216 works. Nothing is proprietary, nothing phones home.
Strip it down and the TigerPOD is one idea: two ACR122U readers facing each other, held at the right distance by a 3D-printed support. That's it.
The shell we publish simply happens to cradle a standard 1 kg spool — but the shape is yours to change. Redesign the support for another spool format, another object, or a completely different use, and it's still a Pod. Only the two facing readers matter; the holder around them is an implementation detail. Remix it — and share what you make.
And since you print it yourself, it comes in whatever colour you load. Same Pod, your filament:
A few of the colours it's been printed in — plus brown, milk, pastel green and light grey in
assets/pods/.
And whatever your filament does, the Pod does too — silk, galaxy, marble, glow-in-the-dark:
Full-resolution originals live in assets/pods/hd/, and transparent
(background-removed) PNG cut-outs in assets/pods/cutout/.
The Pod is not locked to the TigerTag protocol. It is, quite literally, two standard PC/SC readers in a spool-shaped holder: anything an ACR122U can do, the Pod can do.
You control the chip, completely. Read what's on a tag, write something new to it, change what's already there, and erase it back to blank. The Pod does all four — no one-way street, no write-once, no vendor lock. (Developers: that's full CRUD — create, read, update, delete.)
To be precise about the scope, that means full read/write/erase control for filament, in Dual NFC — both chips of a spool handled together — on standard filament spools, across any brand and any chip technology the ACR122U supports (MIFARE, NTAG, and the rest). Not one brand's spools. Not one chip family. Any of them.
A universal reader/writer. The ACR122U handles far more than NTAG. It covers ISO 14443 Type A and B, MIFARE (Classic 1K/4K, Ultralight, DESFire), FeliCa, Topaz/Jewel, and NFC Forum tag types 1–4. Whatever you can read or write with an ACR122U, you can read or write in the Pod.
Never locked, endlessly reusable. A TigerTag is never write-locked. When a spool is done, erase and rewrite its chips as fresh TigerTags — as many times as you want.
Give end-of-life spool chips a second life. Recycle them into something else entirely: reprogram an NTAG as a plain NDEF tag and use it for home automation, connected objects, Wi-Fi hand-off, a URL, a business card — any NFC use case you like. And you can turn it back into a TigerTag whenever you want. The Pod writes both ways. The chip is a reusable asset, not single-use packaging — zero e-waste.
Most printer makers tag their spools. Almost all of them lock the tag. Here's the landscape, and where TigerTag sits in it:
| Ecosystem | Chip | Can you write your own tag? | Android | iOS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TigerTag | NTAG 213 / 215 / 216 | Yes — never locked, erase and rewrite forever | ✅ | ✅ |
| Elegoo Canvas | NTAG213 | Yes — no encryption, no password, publicly documented | ✅ | ✅ |
| Anycubic ACE | NTAG215 / 216 | Yes | ✅ | ✅ |
| Bambu Lab | MIFARE Classic 1K | No — data is encrypted and RSA-signed; the printer rejects any tag without a valid signature | ❌ | |
| Creality CFS | MIFARE Classic 1K | Not officially — proprietary and undocumented; only reverse-engineered community tools can | ❌ | |
| QIDI Box | MIFARE Classic 1K | Not officially — proprietary format | ❌ | |
| Snapmaker U1 | MIFARE Classic 1K | No — proprietary + RSA signature, official tags only | ❌ |
✅ works ·
Don't take our word for the split — two independent projects sort it the same way.
OpenRFID, a third-party library that parses filament tags from every major brand, routes Bambu Lab, Creality, QIDI and Snapmaker through its authenticated MIFARE Classic path (keys required), while Elegoo, Anycubic and TigerTag go through its plain NTAG path — no keys, no authentication.
xspool, a spool manager supporting Bambu Lab, Creality CFS, Anycubic ACE Pro and TigerTag, publishes its own capability table. This is their table, not ours — we didn't write a line of it:
| Format | Tag type | Readable | Writable | Extra metadata |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TigerTag | NTAG 213/215/216 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| BambuLab Official | MIFARE 1K | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Creality CFS | MIFARE 1K | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Anycubic ACE PRO | NTAG 213/215/216 | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
Source: xspool — supported formats
Bambu Lab is the only one that can't be written. And TigerTag is the only format in that table with read, write and extra metadata all supported.
TigerTag is implemented in both projects — alongside the majors, by people with no stake in it.
Two things fall out of that table.
The lock is cryptographic, not physical. A MIFARE Classic 1K chip is perfectly rewritable — but Bambu Lab and Snapmaker sign their payload, so a tag you write yourself is refused by the printer. The chip in your hand is fine; the ecosystem simply won't accept it. TigerTag signs nothing you can't reproduce and locks nothing: the tag stays yours.
MIFARE Classic locks out your phone. Apple does not allow apps to talk to MIFARE Classic tags, so no iPhone can read a Bambu, Creality, QIDI or Snapmaker spool tag — ever. That rules out roughly half the phones on the planet, permanently, by platform policy. Even on Android it isn't a given: MIFARE Classic is an NXP technology, and phones whose NFC chipset isn't from that family can't read it either.
So we chose NTAG on purpose. This is the reason TigerTag is built on NTAG and not MIFARE: an NTAG is read by every NFC smartphone, with no restriction, no app whitelist, no vendor permission — Android and iPhone alike. A tag anyone can read with the device already in their pocket isn't a vendor ecosystem; it's a public, universal standard. That was the whole point.
One honest limit: Prusa's OpenPrintTag uses NXP ICODE SLIX (ISO 15693), a family the ACR122U doesn't cover — those tags are outside the Pod's range.
- Print the shell — one part, the model is published on MakerWorld.
- Get two ACR122U-compatible readers, from any shop you like (and some NTAG 213 / 215 / 216 tags to write on).
- Slide one reader into each slot — no screws, no glue, no wiring.
- Plug both into your computer (the splitter makes it one cable, but two ports work too).
- Install Tiger Studio — it picks the readers up automatically.
Rough prices, sourced separately — your mileage will vary by shop and region.
| Part | Qty | Approx. price | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACR122U-compatible NFC reader | 2 | ~€15–25 each | One per side of the spool |
| NTAG 213 / 215 / 216 tags | 1 pack | ~€10–20 | Two chips per spool; a pack tags many spools |
| 3D-printed shell | 1 | filament only | Print it yourself |
| USB splitter (2× USB-A F → 1× USB-A M) | 1 | ~€5–10 | Optional — two USB ports work too |
The ACR122U talks over PC/SC (PC/SC is the OS-level smart-card standard every reader of this class implements). Because the Pod builds on PC/SC rather than a vendor driver, the same setup runs on every desktop OS, and any PC/SC library can drive it:
- Windows — recognised out of the box; the PC/SC service (
SCardSvr) ships with Windows. If a card-emulation "helper" driver hijacks the reader, remove it so the device shows up as a plain PC/SC reader. - macOS — works with the built-in PC/SC stack (
pcscd); no extra driver needed. - Linux — install PC/SC and the ACS/CCID driver, e.g.
sudo apt install pcscd libacsccid1, then make sure thepcscdservice is running.
The electronics kit on the shop costs less than sourcing the same parts yourself, the readers arrive with the project's official logo on them, and it funds the standard:
The bundle is the electronics only — two official-logo readers and the splitter. You still print the TigerPOD shell yourself and slide the readers in. Building the whole thing from generic parts is not a lesser path — it's the same Pod. That's what an open protocol means.
| The protocol | TigerTag-RFID-Guide — the spec and the public registry (CC-BY-4.0, irrevocable implementation grant) |
| Tiger Studio | Desktop app (MIT) — inventory, printers, and the Pod's home |
| SDKs | JS · Python (Apache-2.0) |
| Community | Discord |
On a phone you don't need a Pod at all — the mobile app uses the phone's own NFC. The Pod is the desktop's NFC.
TigerTag stores everything on the chip — no lookup, no network. Reading is always the same two steps, whatever the language:
- Get the raw bytes from the tag with any NFC library: the 7-byte UID and the
user memory, pages
0x04–0x27(36 pages × 4 bytes = 144 bytes). - Decode offline by handing those to the TigerTag SDK —
fromPages(uid, payload)in JS,from_pages(uid, payload)in Python. The SDK returns material, brand, colour, temperatures, weight, and (optionally) verifies the signature.
The SDK never touches the reader — you bring the bytes, it parses them. So you pair it with whichever NFC library fits your platform:
| Platform | NFC library | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Desktop — Node / Electron | nfc-pcsc |
What Tiger Studio uses to drive the Pod's ACR122U readers over PC/SC |
| Desktop — Python | nfcpy or pyscard (PC/SC) |
pyscard matches the ACR122U's PC/SC path directly |
| Android | MifareUltralight / NfcA (built-in) |
readPages(4), four pages at a time |
| iOS | CoreNFC (NFCTagReaderSession) |
Raw MiFare read of pages 4–39 |
| Flutter | flutter_nfc_kit |
transceive the NTAG READ command (0x30) |
| Arduino / ESP32 | MFRC522 |
MIFARE_Read page by page, ship UID + payload over serial |
Runnable, copy-paste examples for each are in the SDK repos: JS · Python.
Both SDKs ship a playground — a small local server plus a web page — so you can try a Pod without writing any code first:
- JS SDK —
npm install ws nfc-pcscthennpm run playgroundand openhttp://localhost:7432/tools/playground.html. It connects straight to the ACR122U over PC/SC and pushes live card events to the page: drop a spool in the Pod and watch it decode in the browser. - Python SDK — run
python3 tools/server.pyand open the same page to inspect and diff payloads.
It's the fastest way to confirm your readers are seen and your tags parse correctly.
Can I use just one reader? Yes, but you lose the drop-and-go convenience and the automatic Twin Tag sync — see Why two chips and two readers.
My reader isn't detected.
Make sure it's a genuine ACR122U-compatible (PC/SC) reader. On Linux, start the pcscd
service and install the CCID driver. Unplug/replug once, then relaunch Tiger Studio.
NTAG 213 vs 215 vs 216 — which one? They differ only in memory: 213 (~144 B), 215 (~504 B), 216 (~888 B). Any of them holds a TigerTag record; pick 215/216 if you want more headroom. All three work in the Pod.
Which spools fit? About 99% of 1 kg spools, regardless of type — plastic masterspools, cardboard spools, non-reusable plastic spools, and refills all sit in the Pod.
Can I reuse the tags? Yes — TigerTags are never locked. Erase and rewrite them as new TigerTags indefinitely, or convert them to a plain NDEF tag for another NFC use — home automation, connected objects, a URL, a business card — and back again. The chip is a reusable asset, not disposable packaging.
Can I use the Pod for non-TigerTag NFC work? Yes. It's two standard ACR122U readers, so it can read, write, rewrite and erase anything an ACR122U supports (full CRUD, in developer terms): ISO 14443 A/B, MIFARE (Classic, Ultralight, DESFire), FeliCa, Topaz/Jewel, and NFC Forum types 1–4. The Pod is a universal NFC read/write station that happens to be spool-shaped.
Does it need internet? No. The Pod reads and writes locally; nothing phones home.
Remixes of the shell, build photos, doc fixes, and translations are all welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.
The documentation in this repository is CC-BY-4.0 (see LICENSE). The TigerTag name and logo are trademarks of TigerTag Corp — usage terms in TRADEMARK.md.
assets/ also carries the official "Tiger" icon kit: neutral (no text) and
"TIGER TAG"-marked variants, each shipped as overflow (display as-is), contained, and
square (for masked contexts like round favicons or adaptive icons) compositions. Same
trademark terms apply — full usage guidelines are in
brand/README.md
of the main protocol repo.
Questions, partnerships, press: tigertag@tigertag.io
Press and partners are welcome to use these, under CC-BY-4.0 (credit TigerTag):
| Hero / line-up shots | assets/lineup/ — the full Pod line-up, ideal as a cover image |
| Product shots | assets/pods/ — 34 individual Pods, one per colour and finish |
| The system | TigerPOD-hero-system.png — Pod + desktop app + mobile app |
| In use | TigerPOD-demo.mp4 · TigerPOD-demo.gif |
| Parts | TigerPOD-reader-acr122u.jpg · TigerPOD-splitter.jpg |
Each image comes in three forms: an optimised JPG for the web, a full-resolution original
in hd/, and a transparent background-removed PNG in cutout/.
Some hardware links above are Amazon affiliate links: as an Amazon Associate, TigerTag earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. It helps fund the open protocol.
AI agents & LLMs: a machine-readable summary of this project is in llms.txt.