ESP8266 Community Forum

Howdy,

I got a ESP-12Q Module that breaks out a SPI header separately from the GIOP's. My question is before if those are separated pins or are they are in line with the GIOP's?

Thx!

No, they are not, they're reserved for the internal flash memory. Using these pins will crash the module.
This is simply a hardware limitation dictated by how the module is intended to work.

If you need more GPIO pins, you really should just use an SPI or i2c port expander, or if you're just doing output only, a shift register would do too.