I've made a bit of progress on Twisted Lifter during the lockdown. It's a good motivation to get our "workshop" (i.e., a 4' workbench in the back kitchen) tidied and I finally got around to buying a decent soldering iron. One of the few silver linings in being stuck at home is (for me at least) an increased willingness to just get on an bodge things, since it's less easy to go out and buy tools and so on.

I proceeded with my plan to reverse the whole robot and cut off the newly defined rear end, creating a much steeper front wedge. I then cut out a lifting arm (combination of coping saw and dremel work), secured it it insecurely to a servo and then cable-tied the servo in place. Et voila:



I chucked everything in together and the weight wasn't a million miles off:



Part of that weight comes from having a Spektrum AR610 Rx in there with a plastic case, so I ordered one of the newer Lemon top-pin Rxs to save a couple more grams. That turned out to be quite a rabbit hole; for some reason, the new Lemon Rx just wouldn't bind to either of our Devo Txs. I tried updating the firmware, rolling back the firmware, binding in "Orange Rx" mode, going out in the garden, DSM2 protocol, etc.... There's definitely something weird going on there, because I have two of the new Rxs and they work fine with the Dx6e Tx, both Devos work fine with other DSMX Rxs (Lemon, Orange and Spektrum) that I've had for a while. Something to watch out for if you have a Devo Tx and Lemon Rxs, possibly, I don't know. Anyway, I eventually gave up and will have to exclusively use the Dx6e for now with this robot.

The lighter Rx did help, in any case. With no holes drilled out, and a random chunk of plastic bits, I'm pretty much bob on the weight limit:



I had another couple of happy minutes driving this around before another DasMikro went up in smoke. I think I'm going to give up on them and get one of the BBB ones (or the ones that BBB sell only from eBay, if they don't have any in stock for a while).