Four years ago I was a junior engineering student. It was a Thursday and there were no classes the next day due to a holiday. I had been wanting to try out some kind of high-speed flash photography for awhile so I decided to take advantage of the day off.  My concept was to capture the splash of fruit falling into a wine glass. The challenging part is firing the flash at the perfect moment. I wasn't interested in a trial-and-error approach. I wanted to build a device that would automatically fire the flash at just the right time, every time.