Well I'm getting close to wrapping up the building of the Controls Cabinet (CCAB). The second tier contains a DB25 breakout that lets me breakout the second I/O header on the 7i92. That will provide the signals for fwd/rev and coolant on/off and one accessory on/off. The rest will be used for a small control panel to house a few handy buttons for things like run, pause, stop, goto home, goto zero, etc. I'm using pairs of RJ45 cables to carry those. Two go to the Machine Cabinet (MCAB), and 2 go to the control panel (CPAN). I found some handy dual RJ45 breakouts on Amazon for that use.
The NUC computer did not work out. The graphics adapter used by it did not seem to want to work with Linux so there was no way to get LinuxCNC running. That was a bit of a disappointment. Attempted a few fixes but none were successful. So the NUC is going back. I have a older system that I have been testing with and there is no reason that it can't do the job. The up side is that allows me room for better organization of the 2nd tier components. So the PC will connect to the controls via a pass-through RJ-45 connection. External PC/Monitor will be switched on via the two switched 120V outlets on the side. I'll look for a way to mount the PC somewhere out of the way.