Coming off from two back-to-back weekend competitions, we were pretty exhausted! However, we could not afford a break because we had to immediately start getting ready for a demo at the advance screening of the movie Pacific Rim Uprising. The demo itself was quite a success, but there were some funny issues during the demo such as the movie starting right in the middle of our presentation! After the demo, we set to work using our unbag hours to work on repairing anything that got damaged at competition and programming a faster auto.

At Asheville, our goal was to have fun! We had already competed in two district events, so we knew that how we performed at Asheville had no effect on our overall ranking in the state.

The load-in day was both eventful and uneventful for us. During the drive to Asheville, there were two accidents that caused significant delays on the arrival of our pit, tools, and robot. As a result, we had to sit in traffic for a long time. In turn, it left us setting up everything much later than we had planned. After we finished set up, we got in line for inspection. While we waited for it to be our turn, some of our team set out to help our friends on Team 3196, Team SPORK, make their spork pins. It was extremely fun because we got to catch up with them and help them out!

The next day was mostly smooth sailing. Occasionally, our cube collector bent inwards, but we were able to fix it whenever that happened. We hope to fix that issue completely before States comes around. We also had a strange issue where the carriage of our elevator would not lift at all or until the second stage was already up. This happened a couple of times, but we were able to identify the problem and fix it. At the end of the day, we were ranked 3rd!

During Alliance Selections, we were the first pick of the 1st Alliance. At the end of the selections, our two alliance partners were Team 5190, Green Hope Falcons, and Team 587, The Hedgehogs. Our alliance did quite well in playoffs, but we did run into a few technical problems. At the end of the day, we ended the event as District Finalists and won the Imagery Award for the first time in our team history!

Next up: NC State Championship!