so this has been driving me crazy for like two weeks now. running a 5inch freestyle build, the usual stuff, 2306 motors on a 45a stack. front left motor just... stutters when i punch the throttle from low rpm. not a desync exactly, it catches itself but you can hear it and feel it in the tune. already swapped props thinking it was a bent blade, no change. recalibrated ESCs twice through betaflight, also tried bumping demag strength down a notch.

the weird thing is it only does it when the motor is warm. cold boots it flies fine for like the first 30 seconds then the stutter starts creeping in. ive had a bad FET before and that was way more dramatic, this is subtle but definitely wrong. anyone dealt with something like this before. could it be a partial winding issue in the motor or am i overthinking it and its just a flaky ESC phase wire connection

that warm-up behavior is pretty telling honestly. cold starts fine then degrades ? thats classic early bearing failure or a partial short in the windings that gets worse as resistance changes with heat. id swap the motor to a different ESC channel first just to rule out the ESC side, takes five minutes and tells you a lot. if the stutter follows the motor its the motor, if it stays on that channel then yeah look harder at the ESC or the phase wire solder joint. ive had solder joints that looked totally fine visually but were just barely making contact and the thermal expansion would break the connection slightly under load. reflow everything on that channel before you toss the ESC.

demag strenght wont really help if its a physical issue fyi. also check if the motor screws are fully tight, had a similar thing once and one screw had backed out just enough to cause vibration that read like a stutter but wasnt electrical at all. felt dumb when i found it