Kurt, thanks for the dribble. If I started a private Yahoo group, would you be interested in joining it?
I'm a robotics guy, retired mech engr from Northrop-Grumman, etc. Not professional, but as a hobby of 25 years or so. I bought the Edison because it's perfect for battery-driven projects. I have a couple of Mega's on my latest robot, one of which is handling encoders on 4 wheels, commanding the motors, and integrating data from a MEMS 9 axis sensor. The other is processing IR ranging module data (3 modules mounted on a pan/tilt mechanism), dealing with a text to speech board, and running an LCD. I have yet to add several sonar sensors for obstacle detection, but they're coming. The two Mega's would be adequate, but not for handling an occupancy grid 1000 feet on a side -- practically no memory on the Mega for that kind of thing, (not to mention the time it would take to optimize such a grid) or even one very much smaller.
With your help, I have SPI working on the Edison, and communicating with the two Mega's run in slave mode. That's the only contact the Edison will have with the outside world, as the Megas send up sensor data, and respond to executive commands from the Edison. I am, for now, using the Edison-colored Arduino IDE, but I wonder if I wouldn't be a whole lot better off running the Edison in a native mode, rather than through an interpreter. I have Eclipse set up and compiling, even ran the blink routine. But haven't yet spent the time to figure out running programs out of reset... Also, WIFI interface for sending data back to my desktop (WIN7) from the Edison might be helpful, if I can figure all that out as well (have the connection set up per Intel's Windows setup guide).
Keep up the good work! You are a critical resource for people like me who've been around the yard awhile, but aren't focused specifically on operating systems, linux, or various IDEs.