After completing line-tracking assignment we are now more focused on Mars mission. Technically speaking, we started this mission earlier and worked in parallel. Experience and code which we obtained during line-tracking was partially recycled during Mars mission. For example, tape detection routine is used now as cliff avoiding routine.
However, here we got some problems with Mars mission. They are linked to communication between bricks and Earth computer.
We found that communication is very unreliable and we searched for the reasons first we found that the orientation of the RCX is a key factor. The best orientation is when the RCX is pointing to the ceiling and therefore sends the signals directly to the receiver or reflects the signals over the ceiling to the receiver.The other key factor, is the communication error that happens at the earth computer when the 2 RCXs send at the same time. As a result we changed the configuration of the 2 RCXs so that only the master RCX can send continuously a request to the earth computer for the coordinates and the slave RCX only sends the temperature whenever the master requests. We still can see another problem that when the slave RCX sends the temperature, the earth computer doesn't receive again from the master RCX and we lose communication again. We are now trying to check some points to solve this problem otherwise, as an ultimate solution, we could put the temperature sensor on the master brick and sacrifice the center light sensor.
All these problems and others are solvable. We need to make more tests and adjust both hardware and software so that they will lead to successful mission.
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