I decided to do this project after we successfully implemented a telegram bot on a raspberry pi running at our local hacker space (BinarySpace). I felt that a raspberry pi is a bit overkill and that this can probably run just as well on a embedded device. The only real caveat I currently see is getting ssl working on the embedded device.

There are a few options that I'm looking at and now that I have received my devboard I can start on the code :)