ok so i clipped a tree branch (not my finest moment) and now my gimbal on my Mavic is doing this slow horizon drift thing. like it takes off level, flies fine for maybe 30 seconds, then slowly tilts maybe 3 or 4 degrees to the left and just sits there. it doesnt correct itself. the footage is still useable if im flying straight but any kind of turn and it goes weird.

ive done the gimbal calibration in the app like four times, even tried it on a completely flat surface. same result every time. physically the gimbal looks okay, nothing cracked that i can see, motors spin freely. im wondering if its an IMU thing or if one of the ribbon cables got slightly damaged internally and its causing one axis to get bad feedback. or maybe the roll motor is just dying slowly. anyone gone through a repair like this themselves or is it basically send-it-to-DJI territory

ribbon cable is my first guess honestly. those things are super fragile and a hard enough hit can cause micro-tears that dont show any visible damage. the symptom you're describing where it drifts and holds instead of hunting or oscillating sounds more like bad sensor feedback than a dying motor to me. a dying motor would usually show up as more of a jitter or it just straight up not holding position at all.

if you're comfortable opening it up there are teardown guides on youtube, the ribbon replacement is tedious but doable. parts are like $15 on aliexpress if you can find the right model number. just be really careful with the connectors, they're annoyingly fragile.

i sent mine in for something similar and DJI quoted me almost as much as a refurb unit so yeah. ended up just doing it myself. the calibration thing in the app doesnt really do much when its a hardware problem, its more for software drift compensation and if the underlying sensor is giving bad data the calibration cant fully compensate for it. what crash protection plan do you have if any