I finally got around to getting the main board from our uni’s receiving, looks good but unfortunately it will probably be quite a while till we actually power it on, lots of design work to do first.
After some discussion with our current electrical lead (I’m retired 
) I think we have nailed down a few more details.
Since there is a lot of data we need to display, we plan to build it with 2 or 3 displays, probably into one of the long thin pelican cases.
It’s riskier than I’d like but I think we are just going to move forward assuming any eDP panel is compatible with the mainboard if we can get the right adapter cable. and we will probably use one of the USB-C to eDP boards that @Fraoch pointed out above.
As for the battery, there was a bit of discussion here.
Our current plan is that it looks like the SMBus protocol, and the Smart Battery System standard sent over it used for managing battery health are somewhat well documented, so we can probably build our own battery pack with a small micro to monitor it’s health and report over. It will need some more digging, but we remembered that the embedded controller firmware is open source, and after a quick look it seems like we may even be able to mess with the charge rates to better support a larger battery. (Need to check if the hardware can actually handle a higher rate, and if so how much)