Not sure how else to explain it....
Automatic watches are wound by wearing them on your wrist, the movement of your wrist winds the watch and it can be wound in any direction. There is a counterweight in the watch that can spin either direction. The watch stays wound for 1-2 days after you have stopped wearing it so a watch winder can be used to keep the watch wound while not on your wrist, thus not having to reset the time. Many commercially available watch winders will spin the watch in both directions to avoid exccessive wear from the counterweight spinning the same direction.
A watch winder also does not need to run continuously as mentioned before, it needs to run for a "short" period of time 30 minutes or so. Rather then me turning the machine on and then off after thirty minutes, then wwaiting for 4 hours and reapeating the process I would like to have that process animated.
I have no idea how limit switches would accomplish this, are they not mechanical switches that are touch activated?
If the switch is turned of in between cycles then I suppose it would be preferable to have the timing cycle reset so that the next time it is flipped on it starts winding the watch again for 30 minutes from the beggining. But not a must as I would be willing to do whatever is easiest or feasible.
Microcontrolers I have not used before but would be willing to learn,Arduino right?
Thanks, here are a couple of examples of what watch winders look like.
YouTube - Watch Winder KUNSTWINDER 2 watch winder
YouTube - Automatic Watch Winder