TinyWire | I2C library for ATtiny25/45/85

its my first question here and I hope I'm not stepping on anyone's tows :-)

Currently I'm working on a modular battery management system for my electric scooter, based on a ATtiny85 as a master and multiple ATtiny85 as slaves. Each slave is monitoring one cell (or a array of multiple cells in parallel) and also using this cell to power itself up. For safety it reads the voltage of the battery and reads a temperature sensor of this cell. It sends these two information via a isolated I2C bus to the master, which will analyze it and will send eventual a response if this cell should activate balancing or not.

Therefor I'm using the digispark bootloader and flashing the software using USB. The software itself I'm programming using Arduino IDE.

So far I managed to establish a good connection between the slaves using TinyWireS and the Master using TinyWireM. I'm successfully sending data from multiple slaves to the master and vise versa.

But when I remove one or more slaves from the bus somehow the reading routine will fill the not received data with the previous received data and will not write a empty line or zero.

Here is the relevant routine, where I poll through the slaves addresses and individually ask each slave for a payload of 4 bytes. The slave will separate the measured voltage and the temperature in two bytes each and will send the resulting 4 bytes separately over the I2C bus.

The master will receive the 4 separate bytes and combine them again to voltage and temperature and write them in an array at the position matching its cell-number.