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Mini 2 minor crash, should I use Care Refresh or fix myself?

stirfry2112

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I just had a small crash indoors with my DJI mini two. I was flying in a corner of a 13 foot high ceiling room in cini-mode about 3 ft away from a wall. I was 5 foot off the ground and as I slowly climbed in elevation, the mini seem to magically become attracted to the wall and was sucked straight into the wall at about 9 foot and crashed. This has caused the gimbal to lock in an odd position. It looks like if I could open the top as seen on YouTube repair videos, I'm fairly sure I could reattach and reset the gimbal but I’m not sure if that will void my warranty? I wanted to find this out first before opening the plastic case.
 
I’d be shocked if opening it up doesn’t void the warranty. Might want to talk to someone from DJI that has more knowledge than me though.
 
My understanding is that it will void the warranty. Is the gimbal firmly "locked" such that you can't move it by hand? If you can move it by hand (gently), then you could try freeing it and then calibrate the gimbal?

I suspect that if you open it and successfully repair it, and then later have a more serious crash and send it in to DJI, they might refuse to repair it if they discovered that it had been opened. But that's just a guess!

Howard
 
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Gimbals are tricky delicate things and expensive repairs. I'm thinking Care/Refresh if it's a gimbal problem. Any other thing I would send it to DJI Drone Repair.
 
The air flows around a room are altered as you fly the drone and position holding is also compromised by the lack of gps satellites and maybe lack of patterns on the floor for visual position holding. So it isn’t unusual for the drone to appear to be sucked towards a wall or the ceiling.
You’ve paid for Care-Refresh so you were obviously unsure of being able to fix the drone when you bought it. DJI use tell tails in the heads of fasteners on the case (blobs of glue) so they may use internal tell tails too. Why risk invalidating any future warranty?
 
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Thank you to all responders, really good information. Interestingly, after unsuccessfully trying to gently reset the gimbal by hand, I had the drone upside down on my workbench as I contemplated opening it up. I walked away to do more research and when I came back to the drone, the gimbal magically reset to it's proper position and was moving freely again! I did all the recalibrations I could find in the app, did a test flight and it all seems to work again. Really glad I did not use up a warranty claim on this or worse, voided the warranty by opening the drone myself.

I looked at my flight data and was able to see a few interesting things. One, I only had 3 GPS satellites in the room I was in at the time. I had been doing some 360 panoramas of different rooms that night and the others had great GPS, so I must have missed that when I started this flight. Also (and maybe more importantly) as I climbed slowly in cinemode, I actually got up to nearly 12 foot when the drone started sucking into the wall. This building has a 13 foot ceiling and most importantly has a tin ceiling and steel beam support structure and an outer brick wall. When I panicked seeing the drone slowly drift straight into the wall, I can see on the app data that not only did I push the forward stick (which would have been the correct move away from the wall) I also pushed the elevation up stick at the same time! haha. It's actually good that the drone ignored my panicked controls or I would have had a 13 foot drop instead. But I now know that dangers for flying indoors and especially near metal and walls.

Going forward, I am still going to do some indoor drone flying for photography reasons, but I will be much more cautious. Any advice on these two for indoor flight protection? Anyone have experience with these?
DRONEMANHUB Mini 2 360° Propeller Guard, Original DJI Accessories for DJI Mini 2
Helistar Lens Hood Sun Shade Gimbal Guard Compatible with DJI Mini 2 Mavic Mini Drone

Thanks so much for all the replies and information, this site is awesome and you all are awesome!
 
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Great news! I use the DJI Mini 2 prop guards. I purchased them directly from the DJI store. They work great for me - I’ve bumped walls repeatedly without a problem.

Good luck!

Howard
 
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