Something like the allwinner A13 is down at the low end of practical. It’s about $1 per chip, wholesale. People have gotten it running on an ATMEGA before. It required a bunch of helper components however, and took 2 hours to boot up.

We have so many accents, even within England, let alone the empire, that we had to invent a reference accent. Queens English is what the BBC used for a long time. It was intended that all ‘cultured’ workers should be able to converse in it. This meant the upper class could travel anywhere and not have to deal with local accents, when ordering the servants about.

It’s still quite useful, since it is intended to be easily comprehensible to all English speakers. Downside is that it makes you sound like a posh twat.

The dream router is an excellent base to build upon. It provides all the normal functions (ethernet, wifi, router etc) as well as hosting the control software.

Unifi’s real power is when you expand it. The access points make extending WiFi coverage easy. You dont even need a wired link. It will link over WiFi, either as a primary or as a fall back. The flex mini is also quite handy. It’s a little poe powered switch. I have a couple tucked away providing extra ports around the house.

With my setup, I have detailed monitoring and control down to the port or wifi device. I can monitor and control things in detail, or get a high level view of my network.