Is there a fast GPIO Expander or change design?

[vhavard]

I have a project where I need about 14 GPIO pins and have purchased the Feather Huzzah ESP8266 because I also need the wifi capabilities and the total number of pins on this board is inadequate. I bought the AW9523 GPIO expander, but it seems the I2C expanders are not fast enough to be able to read the DHT22 sensor which is very timing sensitive.

Are there any GPIO Expanders that work in such a way as to be fast enough to read from the DHT22 sensor? I'm thinking now that the better option would be to use the Grand Central and a wifi expansion board like the ESP32 co-processor.

Any advice would be most appreciated. Buying all these components to use that end up not working is getting kind of expensive. Contributing to my toy box, though, for future projects, so all is not lost! ;-)

[neradoc]

14 GPIO is not too hard to reach, a typical feather has ~21 GPIO, the ESP8266 just happens to be a very limited chip.
There's a few ESP32 and ESP32-S2 based feathers that would fit the bill.

Huzzah32 V2: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5400
Feather ESP32-S2: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5000
UM's Feather S2: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4769

As well as many other ESP32 family boards from Espressif and others, like the devkits, the Saola, etc.

[vhavard]

That's great info, thanks for the quick reply.

[neradoc]

Ah and the pico W !
(Check what dev environments are avaialble)