crashed pretty hard into a tree branch last week, not a catastrophic crash, the gimbal protector was on and everything looked fine visually. but when i fly now the horizon drifts slowly to the left, maybe 3-4 degrees over the course of a minute. its subtle but absolutely ruins footage. tried the auto calibration in the dji app like five times, does the little dance routine, says calibration successful, then same drift on the next flight.

the ribbon cables all look intact to me, no obvious tears. the roll motor on the gimbal still responds and corrects, its just like its lost its reference point or the imu inside the gimbal itself got knocked around. i read somewhere that the gimbal imu can get miscalibrated from impact even if nothing breaks physically, but i dont really know how to fix that beyond what the app offers.

anyone actually opened one of these up and recalibrated manually or replaced the imu? or is this genuinely a send-it-back situation. id rather not pay dji repair prices if i can avoid it.

yeah the gimbal imu thing is real, ive seen it a bunch of times. the issue is dji doesnt really give you access to the raw imu calibration, the in-app stuff is pretty surface level. some people have had luck using dji assistant 2 on desktop and doing the calibration from there instead of the app, its slightly different process and sometimes gets results the mobile app doesnt. worth trying before anything else.

if that doesnt work honestly the ribbon cables are suspect even if they look okay. flex cables can have internal breaks that arent visible, and a partially broken ribbon to the roll motor would cause exactly this ? the motor is still trying but its getting bad feedback. i replaced one on an older phantom and it fixed a similar issue, wasnt that hard, just fiddly.

3-4 degrees of drift sounds like the roll arm ribbon to me not the imu. had the same thing after a water landing (dont ask) and it was a hairline crack in the flex cable that only showed up under magnification. dji repair quoted me something stupid so i found a third party cable on aliexpress for like 8 bucks and did it myself. theres a decent teardown video for most mavic models if you search around. just be careful with the tiny connectors, i destroyed one on my first attempt