Self-Aligning Anti-Vibration Feet For Your 3d Printer (HULA) 

A wobbly table does not matter for print quality at all, and neither do these feet, this is a principle already known for very long in the precision engineering industry. For precision machines it is standard not to mount them as rigidly as possible to the ground, rather to have as low stiffness coupling as possible. This is done as to minimize the coupling of ground/floor vibrations into the machine, and not to reduce internal vibrations. Internal vibrations are caused by limited stiffness of its own frame and masses relative to its own frame. No coupling to the outside influences this, unless you are running some very weird scenario where frequencies intermix and couple back into the frame (in which case you also have a poorly designed frame). What matters is the stiffness of the coupling of the motion system to the print, and the mass associated with motion system. Dont believe me? Refer to the video from Makers muse where he suspends a printer mid air (it doesnt get more wobbly than that) yet it prints identically. I suspect the different results you were getting before with the wobbly table, to likely be because of incorrect input shaper results, rather than physical performance limits. The results you get in this video are likely more correct (as in 7:40 where all peaks are at identical frequencies). As for your differing results, they could just be noise. Also, the location of the phone matters very much. The phone is measuring accelerations, and those are essentially the movement of the table boards. Changing the exact printer location changes how vibrations are coupled into the board, and changing the location of the phone would change how these vibrations are perceived (The table has its own natural frequency, and you can get standing waves inside of the board). It also does not take into account the frequency spectrum of the coupled accelerations. tl;dr Stiffness from 'world' to 3d printer doesnt matter for print quality, and a sturdy bench or soft feet neither help. And no, the feet also dont help with machine wear. Feet do help with vibrations of the machine being coupled back into tables, thus reducing noise, but this depends on the specific setup.

I just put a 10mm thick anti vibration mat, which are usually meant for dryers/washing machines, below all my printers. They are really cheap, you can cut them with a knife or scissors to fit any printer and they are better than any rubber feet out there while also serving as sound dampening below the printer.

I printed a set of these and put them under my Ender 5 Plus. I didn't notice much performance gains, Klipper's resonance compensation gave me 200 more on acceleration BUT they absolutely made the printer less noisy compared to just the stock rubber feet. As for centering, I personally found it easiest to push and pull the printer so all the feet would hit the rear at the same time.

Thanks for publishing the inconclusive data many people may had ditched that results and scrapped the project, but having more data to explore theories always help the development process of evaluation and reproducibility. Kudos for keeping the good work.

PSA: if you have a stone base for your printer you should be putting the printer directly on it and then have the damping mechanism (feet or foam mat) under that. this way, the printer still has a hard flat surface to sit on, instead of a soft one that allows the printer frame to flex under its own movement which is a bad thing. another thing to note is that whatever damping mechanism you use to dampen vibration must be tuned, or else it is not a guarantee it will work as you expect. you still decouple the vibration from printer to furniture, maybe reducing furniture noise, but the effects on the printer itself may be worse. for example you can have the printer sit on a balloon and have zero noise from the desk or rack, but then the printer will be bouncing and shaking all day long, making the prints worse. or you can have feet that are too hard, making the table shake more, but therefore allow the table to participate in the total dampening effort, absorbing the wave energy and converting it into heat in the wood, possibly making the prints better. do you see where i am coming from? at the end of the day there two interests at play here for the hobbyist. are you trying to decouple the printer from your furniture to improve the noise situation or are you trying to improve your print quality (increase max acceleration potential)? these should not be assumed to be achieved at the same time, even with something like HULA, which claims to hope to improve both, but upon light scrutiny of the documentation is really only expected to achieve the former. this is because the former has to do with the interaction between the printer and the furniture, tackled with things like HULA and other types of feet. whereas the latter has to do with the interaction between the toolhead mass and the frame mass and how quickly the frame can transmit the kinetic energy (stiffer frame) to the damping mechanism and how efficient that mechanism is to converted it away into heat (damping coefficient). if the TPU springs in there are not tuned to the mass of the printer, it will be through sheer luck if the max accel is improved by a statistically significant amount. it's not impossible, but somebody needs to iterate the design of the TPU springs and prove the best one empirically..for a specific printer as all printers are different. further complicating this issue is that whatever you have the printer sitting on will have its own mass and damping characteristic, whether it is a shaky rack or a solid wood desk or the concrete floor in the garage. if you add feet between the printer and said surface, then you add one more variable to the total system and cannot possibly hope to know with any confidence what that will do to print quality without extensive empirical testing. although i can tell you that no feet on the concrete ground is in fact the worst possible option for print quality because of infinite impedance and zero damping but let's not get into that. simplifying this issue thankfully, is input shaping, whose sole purpose is to perform active damping, will do all the damping that will ever be required to improve print quality. which means you actually do not need to rely on any physical damping mechanism whatsoever to improve print quality, but only need to make your frame stiffer. if your table is so terrible that your prints actually improve with HULA, maybe you should not be using that particular table...my advice and opinion is that HULA is for furniture noise improvement only. the point of all this is that the testing on HULA is only useful for the specific printers they were tested on and the specific furniture as well. you have no guarantee these will work for your Ender, Voron or what have you sitting on your IKEA or custom table, unless you or someone already tested it. and unlike all the other feet designs on printables, this one will actually cost you quite a bit of money and time. as a maker project, it is worth doing. but you should be prepared for disappointment if you expect too much from it. lastly, if you are trying to measure vibrations, the tool must be rigidly attached to the sample. the phone needs to be screwed or taped flat down, preferably with no phone case on, not sitting on a stand or propped up against a spool. for the same reason you do not rest the adxl device on the toolhead with gravity alone when you are doing input shaping calibration.

I’ve had these for about two months so far and they’re working great

Eh, literally the most impressive upgrade I've added to my printer is a simple concrete slab. It improves prints and noise more than any anti-vibration thingamabob I've tried over the years.

this is something I really wanted to add to my trident build , thanks for sharing this.

Thanks this save my time and money. I was really close on ordering parts.

wonderful! Just ordered for my K1C. affordable pre assembled!

Thanks for informing about these... from tuning my 2.4 to speed i know how noisy vibrations can be... will definitely check these out :))

Very informative and educational video. Thank you for introducing me the Hula feet.

The test with accelerometer on your phone is fundamentally the same as input shaping acceleration measurement. However this setting method of input shaping, minimising vibrations, and the corresponding measurement method, is misleading. The machine may vibrate as much as it wants around its origin. You want the bed and the toolhead to move rigidly relative to each other, you don't care how they move relative to Earth, which is what accelerometer is measuring. So you want to tie down the machine to something immovable and have the input shaper figure out and suppress inherent resonances of the machine; and then you can place it on decoupling feet for improved quality - less relative vibrations since they are converted to global vibration + damping. Also improved quality of life due to less noise, easier placement etc. The only valid assessment for the feet is by looking at print quality. Not accelerometer readings.

Just recently got into 3d printing with a ender v3 se and I love it. So much so I just got my son an a1 mini. Your content has helped me grow and understand this hobby more everyday. I'm soon to get a troodon 2.0 pro mini only cuz I don't have the time to build a voron 😅. Please keep up the amazing content!!

I think it may be the wrong aproach, here in chile those sistems are instaled in my apartmen an is common knowledge that they only increase vibrations in the building bc the point is to help the building not break in half with a big impact, It may be that for a printer wich is a smaller scale, having it secure to a wall or a rack it may transfer those vibrations better than the feets

Shim your shelves from behind to prevent it from wobbling or bolt them to the wall. Also, the best damper is concrete block with large foam pad, you can get both from Home Depot, this setup will help mitigate vibrations from one printer to impact the others one the same rack.

I never understood the pursuit of dampening feet. The best result is always achieved with the most stable hard connection to the ground.

I love how we went from "DON'T LET THEM VIBRATE! USE CONCRETE SLABS!" to this. It's always a back and forth.

The vibration that does not transfer to outside, will transfer to your inside parts, therefore your print. Idealy you get the vibration out of the system and dampen it as quicly as possible in another separated system. If you end up in harmonic vabrations, not only will transfer to your parts but would as well reduce your device life span. See as example vibrations in the metal miling machines.

You make the best videos❤❤❤

On my voron I use squash balls as feets and the isolate the vibrations really well

This was a great video, and the compliant feet you reviewed look like a good solution for many people. (As you found though, the amount of difference they make will depend on the specifics of each situation.) It led me to think a bit more deeply about the whole matter of motion artifacts in 3D printing. When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of compliant feet, vibration transmitted to the table or even vibration of the printer body itself isn’t necessarily a measure of how much good the feet are doing for your prints. What ultimately matters is how closely the print head is able to follow the intended path relative to the build plate, which ultimately comes down to how much the frame of the printer is being distorted or warped by the forces applied to it. Seen from that perspective, what we want to do is to reduce the impact of forces on the printer’s frame caused by print head acceleration and also dampen the system’s response to its resonant frequencies. If the printer were bolted down to an absolutely rigid table, all of the reactive forces caused by accelerating the print head would go into deforming the frame, resulting in inaccuracies. Adaptive tuning can compensate for momentary deviations and (more importantly) adjust the frequency spectrum of those forces to avoid the resonant frequencies of the printer frame and X-Y motion system, but the total amount of energy being injected into the frame will always be a direct function of the print head acceleration. On the other hand, having a compliant mounting lets some of the reactive energy from the print head’s acceleration go into moving the frame of the printer as a whole, reducing the amount left to go into deforming the frame. Think of it this way, using an extreme example: Imagine a stick clamped upright in a vise. Tap the top of the stick with a hammer and it’ll bend under the force and then vibrate back and forth. Now mount the stick on a roller skate and do the same thing. The whole stick/roller skate assembly will move away from the hammer, but the stick will vibrate much less, because there was less force applied to bending it. This is the main thing that compliant feet are doing for the printer; they allow some of the energy from the print head acceleration to be turned into movement of the printer as a whole, vs distorting the frame and causing it to vibrate. BUT, we need to make sure that the printer (and whatever it’s mounted to) doesn’t end up vibrating at large amplitudes itself, as that motion could result in forces being coupled back into the printer’s frame, causing the very problem we’re trying to avoid in the first place. The best solution is to allow the printer to move in reaction to the forces caused by accelerating the print, but then to dampen out that motion over a longer time period (probably still well under a second) so it doesn’t build up into larger oscillations that would themselves result in distortions of the frame. Thanks for a very interesting video with real-world data and for pointing to the design for the HULA feet!

I had the anti vibration Bambu Lab feet with an adapter that made them not buckle at all but I still feel better having the HULA on my printer. It doesnt wobble like it did with the accordion feet.

I just have reinforced Lack tables and Lack enclosures with pavers coated in plasticoat for the printers to sit on, I have printed various feet for printers over the years and the paving slab with the stock feet have been the best solution IMO

Even when I put anti vibration feet, it didn’t help too much. Then I made the same trick I did for my washing machine. It was very unstable until I put dryer machine on top of it. +50 kg on top stabilized it so I can put a glass of water without a spill. I put 20kg weight plate on my printer to make it stable as rock.

It makes no difference to stiff machines like the X1C. You actually want a nice solid base like a paving slab and use the stock rubber feet. It may make the printer noisier but it will absolutely reduce the vibrations in the machine. These sort of feet just make the machine wobble which could introduce more errors.

I use a cut-up old mousepad with 5 mm foam as vibration insulators. They help a lot with vibration damping, so especially the resonance tests of the Bambu printers are a lot less noisy. Other than that, neither the prints are affected by it, nor did i expect them to be.

I have a double LACK stack in my closet, top bambu x1 has stock feet and a concrete paver underneath, the p1s below have some tpu bambu vibration reduction feet clones, and they seem to be doing really well in that lack stack.

Foam rubber mat, a concrete paver and if you're feelin fancy, a layer of 1/4" felt on top. And maybe buy furniture that doesn't wobble when you breathe on it.

cool comcept

Having had the Bambu Anti-vibration feet for a bit I was wanting to try these, mainly to solve the one and only problem I had. The same as you showed, the feet would "roll" and transfer vibrations to my work surface. I knew there would be little if any impact on quality, just wanted my surface to remain as stable as it could. I switched to these. Becuse I haver better luck with ABS than PETG I printed them in that, along with TPU. One big gripe is that if the surface isn't particularly flat these will introduce wobble, as there's no way to adjust them without adding material of some sort to the bottom. They printed well and look good. I haven't ran any tests, mainly because I am lazy. In my world transmitted vibrations seem to be on par with what Bambu feet achievfed, maybe a little better, although I can't provide anty evidence. Could just be placebo. In the end I would say they don't do any harm, and are fun to print/assemble.

I just print TPU feet with single wall, large hex infil and no top, I then fill with standard silicone and let it dry for a few days, this gives me a vibration free foot for my printers and looks like a solid TPU foot when finished, this is cheaper and easier than the Hula and I am using this design on much heavier machines than the X1C and the Vorons, I'm sure the Hula is a great option, but I don't know if its really needed.

so its generally advised to do the vibration compensation on stock feed while on solid floor? the printer i standing on a wobbly table so i guess its the same principle as the hula feet right?

Each application will require different energy adsorbing components, dependent upon the mass of the unit, its CG, the repetition rate of the impulses, and the natural resonance of the table. If the mfg is using the same foam/rubber/soft energy-adsorbing materials, it's random chance how well they'll work.

Thanks for the vid. I'd be interested to see if you do this same exploration with squash ball feet mods :)

I have been using squash balls under all my 3D printers for 6 years. The biggest upgrade for any 3D printer.

Concrete paver stone for the win.

I have a voron 2.4 and prusa xl, i was not aware of this project. I had made adapters to fit large subwoofer/turntable dampening feet to my printers which seem to be a metal cup with an oddly soft large doughnut of rubber. Not sure how much its helping as i don’t have any before/after prints but i feel like the desk they are on is being effected much less and my prints look pretty clean. I have wondered especially with the voron how one might make that gantry both lighter and the whole printer more resistant to issues like ringing.

Thanks again for the great content and review. The amount of time you save us is just mind-blowing when you do these reviews. I'm curious about the Hula and will dig deeper but coming from mech eng background, at first sight, the Hula makes little sense to me. It's sexy but most likely off the track. Meaning that vibration dampener found in industry and used on large building are meant to isolate very low frequencies. Not necessarily what we need on a high speed core-xy.

Put a concrete slab under it. Dirt cheap, and the best method is ever tried…

I wonder if it would help to clamp the phone rigidly to the table - I imagine some of the higher frequency vibrations might be lost through the phone sliding and/or through the stand.

Do these feet make the printer noticibly quieter? I have an Ender 3 with silent everything next to my P1P and would love to quiet that one down a bit XD

if the printer frame is not rock solid, mount hula on a solid plate then put the printer on top of that plate will give better result?

I have my X1C on a table that kind of sways back and forth. It prints excellently. I think people really just want to feel like they are upgrading their printer. I think that the printer shouldn’t be on anything soft or squishy or floaty so the vibration is predictable and can then be compensated for.

I live in Hawaii (the ground is a resonator), The big island (the volcano is constantly erupting), on the second story of an old building (also cheap likes to wobble), right next to the highway (heavy trucks shake the building), right next to an intersection (loud motorcycle engines, loud base, and rumbling diesel engines can shake the building when the light is red), under a military helicopter flight path (entire wings of Blackhawks, Chinooks, and Osprey fly directly over my house at low altitude every few days). This is highly relevant to my interests.

I am using my custom designed feet printed in 83A tpu and they work great. Havent released the file though because I know people will print in wrong tpu and then complain because the tpu settled. That bearing design is pretty cool though but not a easy print for most users as they need to buy parts just to make them.

I have 2 of that exact same workbench in my room lol. One of them has the optional power strip + pegboard sides though.

performance on a bedslinger would be interesting too

I've had my 3 VZBoTs on their own platforms anchored to my basement concrete wall along with the feet on the printers screwed down to the 1 inch thick butcher block top for quite some time. They are solid as a rock. And I can definitely tell the difference in my prints especially at high speed. But my K1C is just sitting on my workbench which is also anchored to the wall but the printer can be moved around. Even at high speed it does really well on the stock feet. But these seem like a good idea. I may source the parts and make a set for the K1C.

Calibrate your printer on the floor, and then move it to a bench. This will ensure the sensors are reading clean data.

What storage rack brand?

Personally ive had very positive results with the bambu lab feet. It was tricky to get them perfectly centered after installing, but now that they are in place i noticed quite a large reduction in general noise and vibration. I have my printer placed on a dresser and i can only feel vibrations within a few inches from the feet, anywhere else on the dresser i cant feel anything at all.

I'm surprised these didn't make things worse honestly. They appear to add more motion to the printer, now if one was trying to remove motion from the surface the printer is setting on these these would be something to consider.

Why is the smooth sided washer used when installing the bearing?

Damping, not dampening. Dampening means making something moist. You are dampening a towel when you add water to it. Damping means to reduce the amplitude of vibration. The motion is damped (not dampened).

would you mind revisiting this with the phone on top of the printer?

I wonder how it would fare if you put a dampening oil or grease in the HULA?

TLDR: Mass and stiffness is King. By using anything wobbly below your printer you have the chance to introduce nasty resonances that will eff-up your prints. If you want sound dampening decouple the mass the printer sits on.

It's just basic physics. You want to dissipate all the energy imparted on the machine by Newton's third law when the tool head moves. The feet behaves as a dampened spring system supporting the machine. There's an optimal dampening amount that will make the system "critically dampened", this depends on the mass of the printer and how "springy" the feet are. I doubt the creators have done the math to figure out if they actually hit critical dampening for the machines they support.

Just put 30x30 or bigger paving slab (concrete) under the printer and this solves a lot of issues :D

You should be able to find out the sensor used in the phone and then you can look up the datasheet to find the resolution and accuracy of the sensor.

Just used some old ninjaflex tires. Pool noodles might also work.

I just bolted my table to the brick wall behind it and did the glass of water test while the printer was in Ludicrous mode (stock printer feet) : zero vibrations.

Cnc machines are supposed to be anchored to concrete slabs. Why would a 3d printer be any different? Seems to me that these anti vibration feet would only magnify any errors.

You theae would work for a washing machine if you scaled it up?

Squash balls work wonderfully for me.

Why is it advised not to perform a calibration after installing these on a Bambu? The accelerometers in the printer don't know whether they are sitting on stock feet, these feet, or just a wobbly table. How can an active input shaper respond accurately without being calibrated on the *actual surface* on which it is placed? Perhaps perform tests like this on a concrete floor? Those wobbly benches and racks don't lend themselves to valid testing repeatability.

This really nails the type of video I love to see. Something extremely practical, cost-effective, and value add.

So totally useless. As expected, thanks for confirming.

Will it work on A1?

There is a good reason why VZBot is bolting his printer onto the wall 😅

Why did you measure the vibrations of the table instead of the vibrations of the machine? I'd expect the hula feet to reduce the peaks of vibrations and smooth it out in the machine where is could matter.

Not sure if I'm missing part of the video, but I think it's mentioned on the document of HULA that the machine must be set on a levelled surface for it to be effective, so you'll have to first level the table/ shelf, before putting your printer on it. And I don't see you mentioning it in the video, so maybe that's why the result you're getting is worse than the stock ones!

The reason there is very little improvement with anti-vibration feet is because there is a common misconception about what they are designed for. They are not meant to stop and therefore will not stop the vibrations of the machine itself they're designed to stop the vibrations of the machine from transferring to the desk or table it is sitting on. Any Improvement seen with any particular type of feet is purely luck and happenstance. The feet of the printer will never stop the vibrations from occurring within the machine. If resonance is the cause of ringing then the only solution is to dampen the very particular object on the machine that is vibrating in sync to the movements. This would likely be things on the tool head and would be extremely difficult to do. You in essence need to make those parts heavier or dampen them. Putting special feet on the printer would never accomplish this as the table itself is not the problem and not the part that's resonating.

I just put my prusa on a cement paver and put some generic rubber feet under the paver.

phones have to lay flat on the tables to give best sensitivity!

Has anyone tried using spikes as those found at subwoofers? That would be an interesting test, although the vibration frequencies are not even close

maybe just use a concrete slab under the printer as many ppl do for a good reason (reinventing the wheel when the problem solved years ago)

i have a concrete paver right under my printer then 5in of furniture foam, cant even heat the vibrations with your ear on the table XD

I will send a msg over X. I have a design very close to this but I use a single marble as the bearing and a 8 magnetics provide the centering force

For my X1C, I went for a more rigid setup -- made feet that lock into couplers that are screwed in a cement paver, then placed on the floor. Vibrations have never been an issue.

One word for you... Sylomer

Unfortunate that they don't really seem to do a whole lot... but I guess it's like Angus from makers Muse demonstrated, sometimes the printers almost work better when they can wobble around a bit 🤷🏿‍♀️

Damping not dampening you want to reduce the vibrations not moisturize the vibrations.

in conclusion: just use the stock feet

Came to watch a 3d printer video. Ended up watching highly detailed foot content

this feels like the opposite of what's best for print quality. I would imagine bolting the printer down to a massive cement block making everything as rigid would be best. Same reason they make cnc machines big and heavy and rigid. if your trying to reduce vibration then make it heavy, if you want to reduce harmonics you have to dampen. What im thinking is go at it like the archery guys. what about rubber inserts into the extrusion? think slot covers but tpu and almost solid fill in the track. like filling your cnc machines neck with cement or epoxy.

I was getting interested until you showed that I should calibrate without feet and then I would get better results WITH feet. I'm not sure about your background (software?) but to any decent engineer (mechanics or similar fields) this is clear indication of BIG issues somewhere, and your final results confirm it: sometimes the feet enhance, sometimes they reduce vibration measured with the accelerometer. To make it short: there is no way that an elastic/damping element can be blindly applied to a vibrating system to guarantee an improvement: the damping and the elastic components of the feet should be tuned to the actual mass and acceleration of the vibrating component (the printer). Since this HULA does not tell you how thick and how rigid the elastic/damping wavy ring should be based on the printer, this whole test is based on pure luck and the design, which in principle is interesting, literally cannot be suitable at the same time for the A1 and the K1, which differ in weight by a factor of at least 30%. I wonder how bad it would be on my Q1 which weighs twice the A1 mini. My take from this video is about the use of Mercalli and similar apps to evaluate the vibrations on ky printer before and after the dampening mat i bought, one of those for laundry machines

At risk to be hater, I think that the squash mod feet gave better improvements than the hula.

Globuli

3:24 YT demonetization incoming

Why didn’t you show before and after input shaper graphs to actually compare. Just showing the after means nothing without a baseline. Everything I’ve seen so far on this mod is pretty awful results on the actual comparison. And those are some pretty nasty humps in that graph on the results you did show. But again without knowing what the before looks like, maybe that’s a better looking graph?

There's a "BOM" available? Goody! Whats a BOM?

yeesh....when you task an engineer with a simple problem and receive an unnecessarily complicated solution

Over engineered feet

Why not say what "HULA" means?

So an over-engineered waste of time and money.

Cheap phone cheap sensors. Waste of time.

bro just glue your printer to the table and unglue it when moving, this is so overengineered for barely any improvements

so... fancy but useless in the end