ROCK/PAPER/SCISSORS

My partner and I each built a device with an arduino and xbee radios that can wirelessly play rock/paper/scissors with the other. We got it 100% working now, but until today, there were two strange bugs causing me (the programmer) a major headache.

ARDUINO SRC

The Problems :(
The first bug was how the win/loss/tie was being tallied; only one of us ever got the results back from our match (had one of our win/loss/tie LEDs switch on), and it was always opposite of what it should have been. For example, if I rolled first, and chose rock, and then she rolled and chose scissors, her 'win' light would turn on (even though she should have lost), and I would have no outcome LED turn on at all.

The second bug (which turned out to be the reason for why one of us wouldn't have an outcome LED light up) was causing the character 'A' to be sent out the serial port, after each round played. Whenever we started a new round, the program would run through the whole switch statement, and then for one us, begin to start a new round up again, without having triggered the program to do so. This also caused one of us to not have an outcome LED turn on, because I programmed the game to turn off all LEDs on the board (to reset the board, essentially) at the start of each new round.

The Answers! :)
The first bug was due to my dyslexic coding. After I make a choice and send it to my opponent, and receive my opponent's choice, i run the data through a function that compares the two choices and switches on the appropriate outcome LED (win/tie/loss). Well, the issue turned out to be that I was comparing the opponent's choice as though it was *mine* and my choice as though it was my *opponent's*. Thus, we were getting the results backwards and the wrong outcomes. Once I fixed this, we were getting the right outcome LEDs to turn on.

The second bug was due to us not having put any delays in our main switch statement. After adding a 1 second delay before setting the game back into 'gameOver' mode (in the last case statement), we finally weren't getting any extra characters sent out the serial port (which was screwing up the whole game flow). Basically, I have a function in the main loop that is constantly checking the status of the play button. If the play button is high (is depressed) *and* the game's current status is 'gameOver', it sets the game's status to 'start', sends an 'A' out the serial port (to start the handshake with the other device), and randomly picks a number corresponding to rock/paper/scissors while waiting for the other guy to start their game too. Essentially, it starts a new round of rock/paper/scissors. Well, what was happening was that the program was playing and processing one round faster than we could finish pushing the button. Which is pretty damn fast. So adding a 1 second delay in there gave our lowly human hands enough time to stop pushing the button before the game was over.

Other than those issues, we only had one other pitfall, which I'm sure plagues 90% of people working with xbees. At least when you first start working with them, and have been up coding for 12 hours straight: We assigned the same id's to each radio. We figured that problem out early on, but it's still worth mentioning. Make sure your radios actually have someone else to talk to. Talking to yourself doesn't get you too far in the world of wireless communication.