Converting an old mill to CNC one axis at a time

I have an old Harrison vertical milling machine that I am slowly converting to CNC. It all started as the x axis feed motor is 3 phase (I didnt want to buy glyet another VFD) and the bronze nut has a lot of wear (I dont believe you can get new bronze nuts and making one is beyond my urrent capability) so I decided it would be easiest all round to switch to a ball screw driven by a stepper. As I was starting I found Andy Pugh's CNC conversion (on another forum) to decided to evetually convert all 3 axis to ball screws and steppers (I cant afford servos).

I'm just finishing the mechanical parts for the X axis and want to install in the next couple of days, but when I do I will lose the hand wheel. I still need use of the machine so need some way to control the stepper driver.

So, my question; am I better off making a temporary controller with some buttons, a cheap rotary encoder as a jog dial, an LCD display and an arduino (Teensy 3.2), or dive straight into Linux CNC on a raspberry pi 4, to give me manual control of the X axis?

You can set up a basic three axis config and only use one.

Any axes that aren't connected you simply home and then you can move jog the machine.

Unconnected axis should not have a home sequence