Easy question about MESA 7i43

I have what I think is a simple question. I am a hobbyist playing with my Sherline lathe. That means I know that I am wasting time and money for pleasure. I compares well with golf.

My lathe has the standard two steppers, spindle motor, and several limit switches. I built a home-brew spindle encoder and made it thread. Then I got involved building a 3d printer and forgot about the lathe project for a while. Recently I have ordered a MESA 7i43 and plan to switch to a cheap import encoder with far more resolution that the 16 ppr encoder that I made. Actually the encoder that I made started with better resolution but I had to reduce it in order to read it from the parport. Now it sounds like a fun project to hook up a real encoder.

Here is the easy question part - I am thinking that the 7i52s would be the right daughter board to couple with the 7i43. Am I wrong in thinking that it would;

• read a real shaft encoder
• provide 0-10v for the VFD
• read all the current switches and allow me to add more
• provide step/dir for the two stepper motors
• be reasonably easy to implement in LinuxCNC

Would there be a better daughter board for the purpose? Thank you in advance.

Thank you for your reply Andy. I know that I am using the lathe as an excuse to play with the electronics.

That is a beautiful project. Metal housing, nice wire routing and containment.