Hi all,

I've got a watch winder (Maselex) and a month or so ago it stopped working.

I've used a multi-meter and can confirm voltage is making it to the board, but that's as far as my electronics knowledge went!

This is a photo of the PCB:


The microcontroller is a STC10L08XE-35I-LQFP44G.

Apologies but I'm not sure what other information would be useful, what other components could be checked to see why it isn't running anymore?

Thanks
Simon

 

Welcome to AAC.

The nest of wires is impossible to untangle from your photos. In order to troubleshoot the problem several things are needed.

First, “not working” doesn’t mean anything to us. You’ll need to explain what that means in more detail. In troubleshooting terminology there are three basic categories of “not working”:

• Dead—nothing variously lights up, moves, or makes noise depending on what is expected to happen
• Weak—some things happen, but they don’t happen enough to do what is expected to be done
• Intermittent—it “works” but like a proverbial brother-in-law spends some or most of its time on the couch, not working

Additionally, there is haywire where it does things but not things you expect or prefer it to do. When describing the failure, it is always important to describe it as the difference between “working” and “not working”. We don’t (necessarily) know what a working version of your device would be doing, so you need to say, for example:

“It somehow overwinds the watches to the point of destroying the mainspring, I’ve already lost a Patek Philippe Complications World Time and a Rolex 5512 and at this rate I will need a third mortgage to replace what I am losing...”, or;

“The motor is marked 6V but when it is supposed to be running I can only measure 3V at the terminals”, &c.

The quality of your photos is fine, but the subjects are mostly useless. You will need to show where each of those wires goes. To really troubleshoot the problem, you will need to continue on the path you started (but first make a careful visual inspection of the board, looking for any sign the magic smoke has been let out of a component)—tracing the power signal. When it gets to the board it is sent to various parts, you need to follow the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) traces to each place they run, checking for voltage on the input, and if they are part of the power supply, form the output forward.

For other devices, you will have to work out what indicators of operation are available—that is, what signal(s) can you test to decide they are “working”, or not.

If the device is dead, with no action whatever, then you can make a good guess that either the power supply has failed (not uncommon) or the MCU (Microcontroller Unit) is dead. It is very likely you can fix the power supply, but very unlikely you can do the same for the MCU.

Good luck.