I saw this this, which looks cool but it’s a little more challenging than I would prefer.
Are there any easy ways to squeeze more gpios out of an ESP8266-01S? I only need 3 or maybe 4. One of them is for a switch on the device that toggles it in and out of config mode so maybe one of the other pins could be hacked for something like that?
https://www.tindie.com/products/ddebeer/esp32-dev-board-wifibluetooth/ has two extra headers relative to the usual dev board, but since it uses the same module as far as I can tell, I don’t think it actually breaks out extra GPIOs.
I/O expanders are mostly a buck or two. And you can get them on breakout boards for a few bucks more. I just did an amazon search for “i/o expander” and saw lots of them. Since ebay has more parts, there “i/o expander dev board” was needed to see similar parts.