Copied from the November 2010 contest thread, so there's a separate space to discussion.
My project is a programmable strobe controller for high speed photography. A device like this is crucial for many types of high-speed photography, as it can orchestrate multiple sensors such as photogates and contact microphones with several outputs, such as a flash trigger and a camera's shutter release, so as to capture a photograph of just the exact right instant with microsecond precision.
An example; I connected my device to a small electronic water valve, to my camera's cable release port, and