OK, so I've been kind of a slack about updating this thread.
My chassis has been at Porterbuilt for almost a year now so they could get their stuff to actually fit the 4WD frame. It's supposed to be completed this month, but then again I've heard that several times before. The delays in the chassis have halted everything else, and I've stopped shopping vendors for the rest of the project right now because I've gotten too many interested in parts of the project only to have these delays cause the resources to evaporate. So until I have a rolling chassis to work with I am kind of stalled out, it's very aggravating and makes me look like a total flake.
I do really appreciate all the encouragement on my project, to answer your question Abe, I am a computer infrastructure architect, I design large scale computing systems but I am currently between gigs so cash flow is a bit lacking at the moment anyway.
In the meantime I plan on starting to develop some of the electronic controls soon using these little Raspberry Pi microcomputers:
I plan to use several of these to control various things in the truck like the seats, windows, and well, stuff. The cool thing about these is that there is many display options for them from simple indicators to small little text displays and full color displays from small cell phone sized to your typical SatNav sized.
I also haves several of these:
...which are a simple little spinning turn dial that essentially acts like an up arrow and down arrow on a keyboard and when you push it it's like the return key or a mouse click, meaning you can use it with a real simple webpage running on the controllers to create simple interfaces with a cool spinning knob.