Intel Edison is a marvellous device, but the need to power it through a breakout board, either the mini breakout board or the bigger Arduino breakout board, annoys me. Following the advice in Fuzzing on Edison, I successfully got rid of all those boards without using the micro micro connector (Hirose DF 40) on the Edison’s back:

unboxing edison

So, it is definitely possible to have just the ‘naked’ Edison connected to a proper 4,5 V power supply. Take care not to use a 5 V (or even higher) power supply, the specs say “3,3 to 4,5 V input”, differently from what can be used with any of the breakout boards.

Soldering on this really small Edison PCB wasn’t fun, though, and the soldered cables are not that I would trust them in any production environment. As I want to put the Edison in a very tiny housing, I need to think of something more durable. Conductive glue, anybody?