My Intel Edison project

Question

I have recently bought an Intel Edison with the Arduino compatible breakout board. I am planning to use this for an universal translator project. Something like this: http://makezine.com/projects/universal-translator/. But what I am hoping to do is make it into a wearable, controlled by my phone, which would be connected to a microphone and a speaker. The translation would be using the Google speech recognition API and Microsoft translate API.

The problem is that this would involve making the whole breakout board smaller. I have seen many projects online which used the Edison board and arduino and the whole thing was small.

So what I ask for in this thread is a bit of advice about the project:

1. Should this run on Linux or Arduino? Which one is better for this project?

2. How can I make the whole thing as small as possible?

P.S.: AS far as my skills are concerned, I think I am quite qualified to do this project. I am an advanced programmer, so the software side of this project should be a piece of cake and my hardware abilities are, I would say, about upper intermediate, since I have lots of experience in hardware. But I have never worked with Edison or Galileo, so I will need some help in this way.

Answer 1

1) Of you are a good programmer, then use one of the C compilers around (such as Eclipse), and skip the Arduino IDE. No sense wasting your skills on an entry-level IDE.

2) Make the Edison take up less space by using one or more of the stackable breakout boards (https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/272). They are all way smaller than the Arduino breakout board, while still providing the port accesses you need. You will have to provide level shifters to interface the I/O pins, since they are a non-standard low voltage, but not an issue for someone with skills.

Answer 2

1) Arduino is an environment that runs on Windows, Linux, and MAC written in JAVA - What are you actually asking?

2) Size is directly determined by the hardware you are building with.