I'd try to scrounge some old computer from your CS department or buy a raspberry pi and run it on that.
And after all that, hubot still ran pretty damn slow. :(
https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi
Still, Debian only ships nodejs 0.10 (even Sid) for now -- and I'm not sure what the status is for compiling node 0.12 on armv7 (it apparently has issues on armv6 which the rpi v1 runs).
Fwiw, if you can get by with node 0.10 for hubot (Which I think you can[1]?) -- there shouldn't be any problem:
http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/n/nodejs/
Unless you need to compile your own nodejs binary for some reason?
[1] https://github.com/github/hubot/blob/master/package.json