ESP32-LyraT-Mini - Difficulties adding hardware to board

[cannelloni]

Hello!

I am embarking on a project to create a custom white noise machine, and I think I've hit a problem immediately. I purchased the ESP32-LyraT-Mini and now that I'm sitting in front of it ready to work, it's unclear how I would add my preferred hardware for user input. I intend to have 4 push button switches (Next/Previous track, shuffle, repeat), a small screen, two potentiometers (one for volume, one for screen brightness), and a speaker.

However, I'm not seeing any free GPIO pins on my board to wire anything to. The speaker I've solved, but everything else is unclear.

Do I have to desolder the existing buttons? Or have I just bought the wrong board entirely? I've done electrical projects with RaspberryPi and other boards before, but the Espressif boards are new to me.

Thanks for any help!

[Sprite]

That board is not supposed to be extendible, but there's still options if you want to do so:
- The board exposes test pads for the internal I2C bus. You could add a port expander (or even I2C LCD) to that to get more I/O.
- The board has pins for a JTAG connection. If you're not planning to use JTAG, these will function just fine as general-purpose I/O.

Alternatively, you could also decide that switching devboards is less hassle. If you don't need BT Classic, the ESP32-S3-Korvo already has an integrated LCD and the ESP32-S3 on there generally is a bit more powerful than the ESP32 on the Lyra board.