I crashed my Mavic Mini drone last year, really badly hitting a wall, then free-falling onto another wall, tree, and finally ground. It was roughly two weeks after my insurance on it expired. Being into electronic tinkering I decided to see if I can fix it. #drones #DJI
About half of the drone parts were broken. One front arm was shattered near the motor, propeller blades gone, plastic shell shredded, ribbon cables ripped up to pieces, and gimbal plastic and rubber holders ripped up.
The surviving parts were all the circuit boards (control unit, power/motor drivers, IMU), three of the arms with motors. Everything else had to be replaced. Ordering all the parts from AliExpress was easy with only one piece unavailable.
The total cost was ~$100, similar to insurance+replacement. The unavailable piece was the plastic IMU mount that disintegrated into 3 pieces. I hot glued it back into one piece since there was very little strain on it and the whole IMU unit was another ~$25.
Then I waited a month for the parts to arrive. Took me roughly half a day to reassemble everything back together. 
Dis/reassembling the gimbal to extract the camera was the hardest part but YouTube was helpful (). Similarly, the other disassembly tutorials were useful (rcgeeks.co.uk/blogs/news/dji…).
It's worth mentioning the amount of hot glue used to secure the flex cable connectors. If you decide to service your drone REMOVE ALL THE GLUE first. If you don't do it you will likely destroy the connectors as I did. Thankfully in a fixable way but lesson learned.
Be prepared to solder the motors cables to the board. The lead-free solder is a pain to deal with; luckily the pads on the board are huge so even inexperienced people can easily manage with the right tools. I used some spare copper wire to get the old solder off after melting it
Very surprisingly the drone started on the first try, connected, flew, and even transmitted a video. The only issue was the gimbal shifted to the right. No amount of software calibration in the DJI Fly app could fix it. The gimbal itself moved fine in all directions.
Turns out that there is another way to calibrate the gimbal with a computer with DJI Firmware Tools (github.com/o-gs/dji-firmw…). Tutorial for dummies on YT: .
The calibration didn't end up perfect but at least it was within the range that could be corrected in the manual calibration in DJI Fly software. However, it broke the pairing of the gimbal/camera and the control board resulting in "Gimbal Calibration Error Code 40011" in the app
It doesn't prevent the drone from working but it's annoying and turns out there's a way to fix it with drone-hacks.com. Downgrade FW to 1.00.0320, calibrate gimbal in DJI Fly, upgrade the firmware again and error is gone.
Maybe this will help someone who is forgetful about renewing the insurance and dumb enough to crash it like me. Happy flying!
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