This may seem screwy considering the million hits you'll get looking for such an item. they are all over on ebay, ali-express, etc. But sadly, I have never seen so much outright lying as I have in ads related to Lithium Ion batteries, whether for charging circuits or the cells themselves. There are plenty of boards that describe themselves exactly as what I am looking for. But on close inspection they are obviously NOT balance chargers, as they don't even have a management chip. And of course if you pick the seller's brain, you'll get terse answers in broken English that are evasive.The background is, I have a few products I've been working on for years which will all be best served by a 3 cell pack of standard 18650 size cells. That means making provision for proper charging. I've already featured a LED based bargraph style battery health indicator with a push to test button, but beyond that the most economical thing I've found are those cheap BMS boards. You can get them for just a couple of bucks, and they do offer protection, but not balanced charging. So that means I'd still have to supply a separate external charger and tell customers to take the cells individually out of a battery compartment and put them is a separate charger. I'd prefer to find a board that already does both protection (over and under charge) along with balanced charging. Then I could simply provide a charge input along with a wall-supply style 3 cell charger. But so far, all the boards I've found which seem to legitimately do all these functions are pretty pricey. At the very minimum, such boards usually will cost around $10, even for a low current (4 amps is plenty for me) circuit. Thats not a lot I guess, but its certainly a price point where I'd appreciate knowing they actually work as described. Can anyone offer any recommendations?Please forgive the lack of descriptive tags. I don't have enough reputation here yet to create more relevant ones.
Need economical 3 cell lithium ion charge balance and protection board
battery life