My school has successfully taken part in the vision ING competition (they want to support engineers).
We created a device that can checkt the stability of pitons.

the trigger.. or actuator.. why we created that device was an accident that occured because of weak pitons.
It can pull these Pitons with up to 10.000 KG (100.000 Newton), then an Atmega 168 Microprozessor sends the meassure data via bluetooth to a PDA (on the mountain for a quick- projection) or PC (at Home in the office)
I wrote the PC software
More infos screenshots etc. (all german)
And that's how the device looks:
