The only relationships to the Rabco are it is an electrically driven tangential tracker.
The current design is the first iteration and in some areas the materials are not established, like what we are going to use for the tonearm wand. Functionally we want it to run by remote control. It will go to the beginning of the record and cue it. At the end of the record it will pick itself up and return to the resting position. The drive is unaffected by level. We will use scaled down versions of the same electronics used to control the robots. Two problems remain. It is going to be a heavy arm, the question is how heavy. It might be heavy beyond all practicality which I doubt. It will certainly be too heavy for many turntables. The last question is how much. We have to get a rough idea of materials cost. Some of the arm is very new technology and the method of making some parts has yet to be decided. The arm might have to be priced beyond practicality. How many people are going to by a $400,000 tonearm? I would like to keep it under $50,000, the lower the better.
Initially we plan to build 10 units. If they are well received we will look into building larger batches.
The tonearm wand is pivoted in both horizontal and vertical planes. The vertical plane uses a needle bearing very similar to the 4 Points. The horizontal bearing is a very fine ball bearing race without a lubricant. It is limited to two degrees in either direction. The drive will be trained to lead the arm. It will remain perfectly tangential plus/minus a few seconds. There is no need to have more horizontal freedom. It will be neutral balance and the vertical bearing will hopefully be at or near record level. We have not decided on how to trim azimuth yet. We are hoping to be able to control VTA by remote control. We may have to knock off a lot of things to keep the price down.
Patents are not much assurance that you won't be copied but it will be very hard to reverse engineer the arm. There are certain proprietary issues very difficult to figure out. This is very new tech. My son in law was showing me a CAD picture of his companies new device and my brain immediately flipped to TONEARM!
All of my great ideas did not get very far. One is actually marketed today. My partner, the one with the money got tired of paying patent attorneys. 10 year later up pops my design. This one is not going to be a huge money maker but it might lead to other audio related devices and electronics and give my son in law an opportunity to start his own company.