Pi 3 extend the green status led

Question

Can I extend the green led on the pi 3 by soldering wire and led from the same spot or do I still need to add a diode or something? Sorry for the noob question

Answer 1

If you have to ask this question you almost certainly do not have the tools to perform this task, which would be a bad idea. Putting LEDS in parallel seldom works, and it would be a difficult task.

Instead I suggest you use a LED connected to a GPIO.

Name:   pi3-act-led
Info:   Pi3 uses a GPIO expander to drive the LEDs which can only be accessed
        from the VPU. There is a special driver for this with a separate DT
        node, which has the unfortunate consequence of breaking the
        act_led_gpio and act_led_activelow dtparams.
        This overlay changes the GPIO controller back to the standard one and
        restores the dtparams.
Load:   dtoverlay=pi3-act-led,<param>=<val>
Params: activelow               Set to "on" to invert the sense of the LED
                                (default "off")

        gpio                    Set which GPIO to use for the activity LED
                                (in case you want to connect it to an external
                                device)
                                REQUIRED

Answer 2

Just a short walkthrough based on Milliways' answer for raspbian buster (2021):

cat /etc/os-release

nano /boot/overlays/README

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

dtoverlay=act-led,gpio=17

sudo reboot

(For the power led you can simply use a 3.3V pin)