Affordable Watch Winder Takes Care of Your Self-Winding Watch

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If you wear a self-winding watch, I’m sure you’re aware that watch winders are generally very expensive, or cheap and noisy.

So Kristopher Marciniak decided to hack an inexpensive winder replacing the stock motor with a stepper, and using an Arduino along with a Trinamic SilentStepStick driver for silent and well-controlled movement.

“What I really needed was a good looking housing, with the cup and watch holder molded plastic, that I could replace the motor, and stuff the electronics inside. A quick Amazon search gave me lots of $40 options, and I’m sure if you were more patient, you could get something in the $25 range shipped from Asia.

I was interested in learning more about stepper motors and controllers. I had a small stack of Arduino Pro Mini clones sitting around, and the stepper motor and driver were going to cost around $30 shipped. Even with $50 of additional parts, this still put me under $100 for a precision software controlled watch winder. Plus a fun two hour hardware project to experiment with Arduino controlled steppers.”

Further information can be found here.

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