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I have a sheet of foam with 40 or 50 old 7400-series chips - mostly simple logic gates. I could probably make some fun retro led blinky things.
It's crazy what the talented engineers in the 1970s were doing with those 7400 series logic. It's a lost art these days, just throw a 10c microcontroller on your board and control everything with code.
Code is my preference, having spent a whole career as a software dev - I do a lot of messing around with Arduino and ESP. But I remember back in the 70s when a college prof let me play with a bunch of chips he had acquired but didn't have a curriculum put together yet. He let me do a little demo for one of his classes, which was pretty cool. I explained how binary numbers worked, how to step through a counter by pressing a button a bunch of times, read out the count on leds, use the number as an address to a memory chip and other things. He mentioned that the next new thing was going to be a "microprocessor" - a whole computer on a single chip - imagine that! If my school had had an electronics program I would switched my major on the spot, based solely on how fun it was.
Just use WLed.