Anybody use a LinuxCNC interface to DNC/drip feed an old control?

Just thinking about this...

Recently picked up an old Okuma & Howa Millac MC-4VA. 10 HP cont/15 HP (30 min) spindle, 24 tool magazine, Fanuc 6M-B controller with Fanuc Yellow Top DC brush servos and drives and Fanuc spindle drive. "Sequence Doctor" tool changer control run by a Mitsubishi PLC.

For now everything appears to work, after spending some time getting the tool changer hydraulics rebuilt and everything cleaned up.

For reference, the last 3 years I've had a 1979 Lagun FTV-3, 3 HP spindle powered by an Allen Bradley VFD, 3 axis DC servos (Baldor) run by an Intel Atom running LinuxCNC and a Mesa 5i20, 7i29 servo drives and 7i37 I/O card. Also have a CNC4PC MPG control and a touchscreen I haven't got set up yet.

Unfortunately, having been spoiled with the setup on my Lagun retrofit the 6M controls leave much to be desired. Monochrome CRT display, no 3D modeling of the toolpath and doing simple operations takes so much more time due to the anti-ergonomic keyboard and keyboard position.

I've been advised that these machines were never "really" intended for at-machine programming or simple work but I do a lot of that and I couldn't turn down this machine at the price I got it at. For what I'm doing I definitely needed more HP at my spindle and a toolchanger.

So for now I don't want to mess with what works, but I'd really like an "at-machine" control that I can accomplish a bit more with, and especially something I can throw a wireless keyboard/trackpad on.

Thinking seriously about putting a RasPi or similarly capable SBC with a touchscreen hanging off the side, with a serial interface to the RS232 port on the 6M controls. Wondering if anyone has done this, where instead of LinuxCNC commanding parallel commands out to motion control devices it is used as an interface that spits out serial text commands instead? Didn't see anything on the Wiki about how a person would go about doing that.

Just remember the RS-232 port on a 6M is pretty slow (9600 or less). We run an old 11M machine with some DNC software (can't remember the name), but it isn't much more than a terminal screen for sending G-code files through. With Cam generated carving code the serial port is the bottleneck, but the control isn't much faster.