ESP32 Forum

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!

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.