A lot of making goes on in this community these days, but sometimes you’ve just gotta do some old fashioned hacking. You might have grabbed an old Speak and Spell that you want to repurpose ...

Using a single GPIO port on a microcontroller to control N bits of arbitrary parallel binary outputs, e.g., a multi-digital display.

If all you want is just a basic WiFi extender that gets some level of network connectivity to remote parts of your domicile, then it might be tempting to get some of those $5, 300 Mbit extenders off ...