Week 5 – The Conception Of The First Full Prototype!

Somehow, we’re already halfway through the project! This week, I’ve made a few major breakthroughs on the TapCap! As you may remember from my past blog posts, I had three main challenges problems to solve while developing my prototype.

1. The watertight flow-stopping mechanism that would stop leakages.
2. How I would use to attach the device to the faucet.
3. Where I would house any electrical components (without letting water come into contact).

The first of the three remains the same – I plan on using a plug (represented by the gold item) to regulate the water flow through the device. I plan on increasing the size of this plug as needed to ensure that the water flow rate doesn’t become abysmally low. The device will remove and insert the plug to stop and start water flow, as described in past blog posts.

Above are isometric and birds-eye views of the TapCap. I plan to attach the TapCap to the faucet by screwing it into faucets to make it as watertight as possible. Every faucet has something called an “aerator” that introduces air into the water flow. This introduction of air is crucial as it simultaneously saves water, increases water pressure, and reduces potential exposure to lead particles. Essentially, it’s a mesh shield over the spout of the faucet.

Image obtained via PlumbingSupply. To make sure TapCap didn’t remove the importance of aerators, I came up with the following design. My faucet uses a male-threaded aerator with a female-threaded faucet, so I designed the initial TapCap prototype to fit that:

The threads at the top of the device are how the TapCap will screw into the faucet.

These threads at the bottom of the device are how the aerator will screw into the TapCap. With this design, I have successfully incorporated the benefits of an aerator as well. Future revisions should take much less time as they will only be incremental changes to the current design. I’m focusing on tackling the third challenge of housing the electrical components without allowing water to come into contact. The current prototype I’ve shown throughout is being 3D-printed as we speak (huge shoutout to my advisor, Mr. Magno), and I will have an update after testing it out by next week. I’ll see you all then!