Thanks for the responses. I'm starting with this version (I didn't build it I downloaded it) edison-rel1-maint-weekly_build_16_2014-10-14_14-56-19.
When I run: npm install usb, it looks like your screen shot above until the build fails because it can't find libusb-1.0
Package libusb-1.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libusb-1.0.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'libusb-1.0' found
gyp: Call to 'pkg-config libusb-1.0 --libs' returned exit status 1. while trying to load binding.gyp
gyp ERR! configure error