16 relay board with integrated ESP32

Hello, i have a project to control lights via 16 relay.

At first i tested it via standard ESP32 devkit board and separate 16ch relay board. That is working fine, i can control all the relays via GPIO (simple gpio output and switch).

I bought another board, where the ESP32 is integrated directly on board for “nicer” installation.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007827993385.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007724505151.html

When powered up with standard sw coming from factory it had sort of a program to trigger all the relays on and off one by one. SO it should be working.
However, once i flashed esphome on it i cant seem to find a way how to control the relays on that board.
Its not like you have to somehow bridge the gpio with some other pins like on some other boards, seems its all integrated on the pcb.
As its not working on gpio, probably it has some sort of serial communications with some chip that controls the relays not via gpio.
However i dont even know to start how to control it, as there is no documentation from the sellers and i cannot find any info about it anywhere.
i tried few examples i found here on forum, but no luck so far, as they were for a different boards.

Anybody have any experience with such a board and any example yml ?

Thanks.

I have found a similar board with ESP8266 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003032211092.html which mentions the SN74HC595.
ESPHome has documention for that component.

French article using your board with ESPHome

and here: 16xRelay with ESP12F Onboard and two Shift Register (74HC595)