Could I use an ASUS router instead of a Raspberry Pi to run HomeBridge?

[XIII]

Recently I bought a Raspberry Pi (3B) to experiment with HomeBridge:

https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge

While I set up the Pi I noticed a lot of similarities with my ASUS router (RT-AC66U) running the awesome RMerlin firmware.

Would a more recent router be able to run HomeBridge by itself (without a Pi)?

It should at least be able to run a lightweight NodeJS server to do that.

Note: I'm not using any of the special I/O pins of the Pi right now.

 

[sfx2000]

Not recommended - Pi (and more importantly Raspbian) is much newer on the OS side, and it's a full Debian Jessie software stack...

Embedded linux like AsusWRT - might be able to get things working, but consider the effort to do so... and Pi has more RAM and flash space as well.

So getting NodeJS (and the rest of the stack) - better on the Pi, and let the Router handle the routing and firewall duties...