Well, the inspiration for this came 100% from http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/FinalProjects/s2005/jaj37/index.htm and their P-P-P-Palm project.  The basic premise of my project is to use a digitizer (aka touch panel, touchscreen, etc) from a palm pilot, with a microcontroller.   Upon seeing that site for the first time, I immediately checked ebay and was pleasantly surprised to see a bunch of touch panels from older palms (such as the palm III) going for just a few dollars apiece; I believe I paid around $10 total for the two that I originally bought.

 The first issue was connection; the digitizers use a Flexible Printed Circuit (FPC) plug, which is unsurprising considering all the electrical part of the thing is printed on flexible plastic to begin with.  The spacing is 1mm, and there are 4 conductors.  I bought a pair of surface-mount 1mm 4 pin ZIF connectors from digikey at about $1.50 apiece, and made simple breakout board PCBs to bring them out to a 4-pin 0.1" spacing header so it could be plugged into a breadboard.

My current progress is that I have hooked them up to a breadboard, and been able to observe the voltage change as different spots are touched, proportional to the position left-to-right, and top-to-bottom, depending on which pins i'm powering and measuring.  I'll try and put together a little mini-tutorial of how resistive touch panels work for this article, when I get the time.