I’m excited to see what you come up with. I’d also love to see, somewhere down the line, the controller updated to current popular V1 “standards”. My controller is just a simple Nano-based GRBL controller… and though I, too, have a literal pile of controllers, I don’t have anything in my junkbox more current.
I did, however, start with LinuxCNC back in the 2010-2011 timeframe and I’ve thought it would be really neat to switch MPR&P over to LinuxCNC… just to come full-circle and make this thing all the more unique. Here’s LinuxCNC on Ubuntu controlling my BuildYourCNC-inspired needle-cutter machine back then…
and now, gone is the desktop PC and its parallel port. My “inexpensive LinuxCNC interface” is a little two-board setup, with LinuxCNC now running on a RPi4, with a few GPIO pins connected to three or four DRV8825 drivers… and we have all we need to run our 3-axis machine.
But for now, I’ll leave it GRBL-based… and see if I can’t make it look more like a… [this was funny to me 
]…
Have fun!
– David