I am designing a power management board. The board should be able to distribute the power across a system and manage the power coming from a solar panel, while recharging batteries with excess power. I used TI's BQ25703A to perform this task, achieving MPPT with input voltage regulation and charging 4 Li-ion batteries put in series.
Unfortunately the chip does not handle battery balancing. Implementing this - either with Amazon boards or adding a balancing IC to the board - would result in a huge complexification of the board design, so I'd be quite happy if that could be avoided.
I'm worried about safety issues, not performance/longevity of the batteries as we are in an early prototyping phase. Each Li-ion battery already has a circuit for protection against overvoltage, overcharging and overdischarging.
Is just monitoring each battery voltage and performing manual balancing as needed a suitable approach?