No Sweat. If you're going to rip off a pad, ground is always a good choice, since there's plenty of ground pads
Once a pad is gone, it's hard to see where it used to connect, but if you look at this picture, you see that it connected on 3 sides to the largest area of copper. If you want to keep the wires all together like they originally were, I'd take an exacto knife, and carefully scrape the red coating off the copper right below the ground pad in this picture. Once your down to copper, you can solder the wire there. Note that the copper in that area is NOT connected to the LED next to it.
- esc32a.jpg (107.44 KiB) Viewed 7369 times
An easier way would be to look farther down on the same edge to the I2C pads for clock, data, and ground. There should be no problem at all using that ground pad, and you won't likely be using I2C so you won't need it anyway.
Cheers,
Rusty