Build Your Own Smart Watch Winder and Never Worry About Winding Again!

While the majority of watches today are powered by small batteries, mechanical watches were traditionally driven by springs. Every so often you’d have to wind up the watch to put tension back on that spring. Eventually self-winding watches (also called automatic watches) were developed that use your own movement to wind the spring. Today, self-winding mechanical watches tend to be fashion statements, which means you can end up with a large collection. To keep them wound when you’re not wearing them, you can create your own Smart Watch Winder designed by Davide Perini.

As designed, this Smart Watch Winder can handle up to six individual watches at any given time. Each watch is housed within its own protective enclosure, and those can all rotate independently to keep the watches wound. There are many options for determining when to start winding each watch and how long they should rotate. Thanks to a connected Raspberry Pi and Home Assistant, you can send commands through a self-hosted GUI, setup automated schedules, and even voice commands. You can, for example, integrate it with your Google Assistant so you can simply ask Google to wind your watches.

Each of the watch containers is attached to the backboard via a small BYJ48 stepper motor. The stepper motors are controlled by an ESP8266EX D1 Mini, which has a built-in WiFi adapter, through a ULN2003 stepper driver. Each D1 Mini also has a small 0.96” SSD1306 OLED screen attached to show the status of each watch’s winding. You’ll need a set of all of those components for each watch that you want to be able to wind, which means it can be expanded to handle as many watches as you like. Perini’s own Arduino Bootstrapper library is used as the basis for the code. A simple plywood enclosure was constructed to mount the components. If you’re sporting a collection of self-winding watches, this is a project you should definitely consider.