This sort of touchpad speaks some special Apple mouse protocol. Luckily I found a code snippet on mikrocontroller.net which helped a great deal to get the thing going.
Then I used a standard AVR ATMega8 microcontroller to glue the transmitter and the touchpad together. That means, I poll the status/position change from the touchpad and if some swiping action was detected, the relative change of coordinates is sent via the radio.
I designed a compact double sided PCB housing both the microcontroller and the radio. It also features a 5V voltage regulator for the microcontroller and the power supply of the touchpad, as well as a 3.3V regulator for supplying the radio.
The touchpad is then connected to one of the free GPIO pins of the microcontroller which are accessible via dedicated pin headers
