Abstract: A system is described for maximizing sales of perishable items while minimizing the waste produced. The system employs a number of stores each having at least one production department, such as a bakery or deli department, etc. The stores are linked to a corporate computing entity having a central CPU and corporate database. Each of the stores keeps a history of items made and sold for many time periods. The items sold for past equivalent time periods is used as an estimate of the number items to make. The corporate computing entity can determine a model store which has the best performance. The production plan for the model store is normalized and used to adjust the production plan. These numbers are calculated and rolled out just before they are needed from the east coast time zone through the farthest west time zone.

Abstract: A detonation detection system for internal combustion piston engines which senses pressure within each cylinder through a piezoelectric force transducers installed under each spark plug producing pressure charged signals which signal is converted from inline charge to voltage. The signal is then passed through a gating comparator which segregates out the low pressure signals associated with intake and exhaust strokes. The signal then passes through a high-pass filter which removes normal combustion pressures. The filtered signal is then processed through an RMS (root mean square) to a DC converter which continuously computes the instantaneous square of the input signal, averages it, and takes the square root of the result to provide a DC voltage proportional to the RMS of the input. The DC signal is then processed through a peak and hold circuit which holds the peak signal for an adjustable reset-time period.