[Simy]

Yes sorry about using the wrong term, I just woke up and need to get ready for work. On Paul's design he added some sort of fuse to blow if the circuit was draining the battery due to an open gate failure. I'm not familiar with these yet so I will need to do some studying on them.

I would be happy to help you design this and as it happens I have 4 lipo packs that my charger cant charge because of a false peak.

I figure the master can add up the cells current requirements and have the charger output that, so the output is variable and best for each one and if your design works the way I think it does the shunt of each cell can take what that battery needs. Am I understanding the theory so far?

Is it safe to assume that the highest and lowest battery should be within 1/2A of each other? Or am I missing something?

How does it balance? Does it balance the load a bit by drawing a bit more power from higher batteries and less from lower batteries, or does it discharge the higher batteries to the lower batteries?

If your design of the cell moniters is static I'll look into ordering the parts and use some of my old nimh AA's for a test, and then move on from there. Battery chemistry shouldn't matter and my charger can be used as a power supply so a simple addition to it should mean I can use my current charger to output a steady voltage/amperage and a PWM controller to lower the current as required. The actual charger should do this. Then I can help program the pic. =)