Brewpi: Anyone using an Raspberry Pi alternative (local Android device, cloud hosted service, etc.)?

I currently don’t have a Raspberry Pi, and was wondering if anyone else had ventured off the beaten path for another hosting platform. I’m still very new to this, but from my understanding, there are really just two components running on the Pi that we care about: some python scripts and a web server.

I’ve been playing around with Bluemix for work (http://www.bluemix.net) and was thinking about hosting those pieces of it there which could allow for some potentially other cool tie-ins. Another option would be my always on Android TV dongle which would be on the local network.

I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work, but I haven’t tried it yet either. The one configuration piece that I haven’t seen yet (and I’m still waiting for my Brew Spark to be delivered so I’ve been trying to not get too ahead of myself) is whether or not the Brew Spark requires the web/python piece to be local as opposed to on the Internet.

Any thoughts?

Limited but relevant experience here - I initially tried running the script and www on my NAS device (which is a custom Debian distribution), as its a lot more powerful than an Rpi, and is on 24x7 to serve several other web apps anyway.

After quite some time fiddling, I conceded it isn’t yet suitable. As a side observation, Cross-compiling is a pain - couldn’t build any working toolchains to compile for the Spark (or any other arch for that matter). But the real show-stopper was that the necessary drivers to communicate with the spark over USB weren’t installed. This is the ACM driver that is needed for the Python script to communicate over serial. To install it on my version of Debian, I would have to recompile the Kernel, which I wasn’t keen on, and would no doubt impact the operation of the NAS services.

So I went back to the Rpi, on which everything simply just works as Elco and co has documented.

At the moment, without WiFi support, pretty much the only limitation is that the system must be able to communicate over the USB port. Once WiFi support is available on the Spark, there’s no real reason you couldn’t run it on anything that communicates over IP, with appropriate routing, and runs python and a webserver.

That’s my conclusions anyway - happy to stand corrected by somebody with more experience of course!

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Thanks for the response, Ben. I had been under the (incorrect) assumption that since the Spark Core had Wifi, it would be supported. It sounds like that’s on the upcoming features list, but still may not work with a non-LAN webserver based on another comment from Elco I found when I started searching for “wifi.”

Guess I’ll get that Pi ordered in the interim and leave my dreams of hosting the other piece elsewhere for now.