been having this really annoying issue for about two weeks now and cant figure it out. one of my motors ? rear left ? will just kind of cut out or bog down randomly during flight, not consistently, sometimes it flies fine for ten minutes and then suddenly the quad flips out for half a second before recovering. betaflight logs show a motor output spike on that corner when it happens.

ive already reseated all the motor wires at the esc, resoldered the motor bell connections which looked a little cold honestly, and reflashed the esc firmware. problem still happens. the motor itself is maybe 6 months old and doesnt have a ton of flights on it, spins smooth on the bench with no load and doesnt get noticeably hotter than the others after a hover test.

im running a 45amp 4in1 esc and the draw on that motor shouldnt be anywhere close to the limit. kind of at a loss here. is there any way to diagnose whether the fault is in the motor vs the specific esc channel without just swapping parts around?

swap that motor to a different position and see if the problem follows it. if rear left is still dropping out then its the esc channel. if the problem moves with the motor then you found your culprit. its tedious but its really the only clean way to isolate it without an oscilloscope or something. the symptoms you're describing could honestly be either one ? intermittent esc fets can be really hard to catch on the bench because they only act up under thermal load or actual flight current draw.

also check if there's any play in the motor shaft, even tiny amounts can cause weird behavior that doesnt show up in a no-load spin test.

yeah the swap test is the move but also ? did you check the motor screws? sounds dumb but ive chased an intermittent dropout for like a week and it turned out one screw was just barely loose enough that under vibration the motor was making slightly inconsistent contact. the betaflight log looked like an esc issue but it wasnt. just something to rule out before you start pulling the esc apart