It's painful, but yes. On a smooth floor it should drive around enough to be considered active. When upside down we have little weight of the wheels and only 2 contact the ground anyway, so it's by no means perfectly invertible, but it does drive. Sort of.

Possible breakthrough: it just finished charging but after feeling the top panels, only one side is as warm as the batteries used to get when charging (alarmingly hot, but right). The other side is warm but hardly, whilst as I say the other side is too hot to touch.

Does this mean we're only properly charging the fully heated side? Or perhaps does it mean that the really hot side has a high resistance, maybe due to shoddy cells, and so it not only gets very hot but doesn't charge properly?

I feel more confident in saying it's the cooler side that is somehow wrong. Until now it has driven fine when both sides have been equally hot after charging. We may have a dodgy cell somewhere.

I can't diagnose it yet, but we may be running on half capacity, or more or less half. They're two 1.3ah packs in parallel, one side is hot, the other warm, any idea what that could mean?