GPIO Pins on VESC?

Hello,

My friend and I are students at the University of Michigan and we are trying to create an electric longboard for our embedded systems class. We have decided to get an off the shelf VESC for our project and are having some issues determining whether or not we will be able to interface with one. For some context, we are working with a budget of $1000 dollars.

For our project, we are hoping to add RGB lights that are controllable from a custom remote that we are creating. We also want to be able to communicate with the VESC through bluetooth. Our current understanding is that the VESC communicates over UART, which we are familiar with. So our main concern is whether or not there will be GPIO pins that will allow for some interfacing with RGB lights.

Are there any relatively inexpensive (under $500) longboard kits that use VESCs or just VESCs themselves that have accessible GPIO pins? Any help would be greatly appreciated.