okay so i dropped my mavic pretty hard a few months back and the gimbal ribbon cable tore. got a replacement cable off amazon, followed a youtube video to put it back together and it seemed fine at first but now like a week later the horizon is just slowly drifting during flight. not a huge amount but enough that my footage is unusable after like 30 seconds of flying.

i recalibrated the gimbal through the app like three times. sometimes it looks perfect on the ground and then as soon as i take off it starts going. its not wind, ive tried this in dead calm conditions. the roll axis specifically seems to be the problem, pitch looks okay.

im wondering if maybe i didnt seat the ribbon cable properly or if i accidentally messed up one of the gimbal motors during reassembly. tbh i was pretty nervous taking it apart and i might have put a tiny bit too much pressure on the roll arm at one point. would a damaged gimbal motor cause drift like this or would it just stop working entirely

a partially damaged gimbal motor 100% can cause drift, it doesnt have to be fully dead to cause problems. if even one of the coils is damaged or a connection is intermittent the controller is still trying to hold position but the motor cant actually respond fast enough or with enough torque to keep up. so you get slow drift instead of a hard failure. if you have a way to monitor the gimbal motor currents that would tell you a lot but most consumer drones dont expose that easily.

honestly though my first guess would still be the ribbon cable seating. those connectors are really finicky and if its not fully locked you can get weird partial signal issues that show up as exactly this kind of drift. open it back up and look really carefully at the ZIF connector, make sure the cable is fully inserted and the lock is actually clicked down all the way

i went through something similar after i repaired mine and it turned out the imu inside the gimbal unit had gotten slightly shifted when i was handling it. there's a tiny vibration damper pad that holds it and if that gets messed up the gimbal calibration never quite settles right. not sure if thats fixable without replacing the whole gimbal unit to be honest. fingers crossed its just the cable for you