[apalrd]

I'd stay away from the Cypress (FIRSTtouch) board if possible.

We used it in 2010 with nothing but problems - Back then, the Classmate was totally locked down so when in Driver mode you couldn't open Task Manager. The Cypress driver seemed to randomly crash when exiting sleep, and you would have to reboot the laptop, sometimes twice, for it to find the board again. Our only solution was to never shut down the laptop ever, which was very hard with the lack of power at the driver station that year. I don't know if they fixed it, but I've still found that the Cypress drivers aren't always installed and many of our driver station laptops don't have them.

In 2011, we used the Classmate with two gamepads (a Logitech DualAction and a 360 gamepad), plus an IO box with an autonomous and other less-used switches which we made out of a Logitech Precision gamepad, which lacks analog sticks. We took the PCB out, and soldered to all of the pads where the switches were, and it worked well.

As for laptops, we are currently planning on using a Dell Latitude D630, which has two batteries.