Electronworks, that looks like it would be great and will definitely keep it in mind, but I live in U.S.
Also, I dug a bit deeper into my electronics stash and found a few altera max 7000 DeVry eSOC development boards. I emailed altera and am waiting to hear back from them about a datasheet or schematic in hopes that I can use those and simplify everything a lot. I haven't used that board in about 5 years, so I'm not real familiar with it anymore, but I do know it uses a wall to 9V adapter and from that plug it goes through a 7805 with a decent size heat sink, so will I be able to just snip the plug off the adapter and splice that into the car or do I need something to drop from 12 to 9 and then use the adapter plug?
Sorry about the newb questions
edit: if you do a google image search for "DeVry eSOC" the second one is the board that I have, unfortunately, the page doesn't exist on DeVry's site anymore so no info there.