The PLC HMI arcade cabinet started as a hobby build and ended up being genuine plant equipment on the inside. It began by moving the crank of the Playdate game Root Bear onto a potentiometer lever, and it now holds four games across seven posts.

The cabinet title screen

The structure from part one was simple: the Senbrix PLC owns flow rate, scoring, and the leaderboard, and the 800×480 touch panel only draws. After that the hardware kept choosing the games. Four physical buttons brought blackjack, an analog joystick brought a vertical scrolling shooter, and the beer lever, picked up again, brought fishing.

The first game and the lever

The bones of the cabinet, in two parts. It started by turning the original’s crank into a lever you pull with your hand.

Becoming a real cabinet

Several games in one machine, all the way down to your fingertips. The moment the title screen became a game select menu, the cabinet turned into a platform.

The input picks the game

Two parts where the hardware came first and the game followed it. Each new input device was one new game.

What the arcade cabinet series comes down to

The reason games kept fitting onto one machine was the structure set in part one. Logic and state live in the PLC; the touch panel only draws. From game two onward the leaderboard and the comms layer were inherited as-is, and the build time halved.

  • Pick the input device first and the game will follow
  • Choose parts the board can actually drive, not the ones you like
  • One logged value beats two plausible theories
  • “Not fun” is only fixable once it is translated into a number you can change

The cabinet kept growing not because the ideas were good, but because the first build put the logic in the PLC and left the screen with nothing but the show.

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