D1 Mini Expander Shield

Add 16 extra GPIO pins to your ESP8266.

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The ESP8266 is a great and cheap chip, but it doesn’t have many GPIO pins available. Half of them is taken up by the flash memory chip, and half of the remaining pins have additional function on boot, which makes them tricky to use. So you connect your SPI display, and some sensors over I2C, and you are left with two pins only, and they have to be pulled up on boot. What about all those buttons you need to add to your project? Well, sure, you could use the D1 Mini X-Pad Shield if you just want the buttons, but this is a much more versatile solution.

With this shield you get additional 16 GPIO pins available over the I2C bus. And you can stack up to 8 such shields, for the total of 128 pins! They can work as input (with weak pull-ups, so perfect for buttons) or output, and they even have interrupts. Sure, they are slower than the built-in pins, and you can’t do PWM on them (for that try Servo Breakout for WeMos D1 Mini ), but they can let you free up some of the internal pins for that.

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