Keypad instead of joystick?

[Sparkyshires]

Hello all!
I've been thinking about using a keypad instead of a joystick for our secondary driver, as he normally has a lot of mechanisms to keep track of and hardly ever seems to use the stick part of the joystick.

My question is thus: Does anyone have experience programming third party keypads? This may sound crazy noob, but can you honestly just plug up some logitech keypad and all the functions are the same (GetRawButton, etc.,) or are there other libraries that are going to have to be downloaded, and if so do you guys have any recommendations for good/easy to program keypads?

Thanks!