Hi all,
We (a group of people in Medecins Sans Frontieres, the British and American Red Cross, and the Missing Maps project) have been working on ODK deployments in really remote areas (Congo, Chad, etc) where there's no practical access to the internet, even to download software and survey forms. In the interest of a fully offline, portable solution, we've managed to get ODK Aggregate running on an Intel Edison (tiny, extremely low-energy-consuming computer). It's still a bit of a hack, mostly in that it's a very fiddly install, but when successfully installed it works really well.
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Local server that generates its own access point, so no need for a router; one device provides both the server, the DNS, and the access point.
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ODK Collect and a few other utilities on the local server so that people can download the software onto their phones without any connection (saves a lot of USB cable and Bluetooth transfers).
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And, of course, a tiny, superportable ODK Aggregate installation that fits in a pocket and runs on a small battery for days.
The upshot of this is you can go to rural Congo with nothing more than a tiny server in your pocket, find local people with Android phones even where there is no cellphone service (a surprising number of people have phones that they use as music players etc, even when there's no mobile coverage), and easily get them started without any external dependencies.
It seems like others might be interested. Anyone who's stood on the top of a hill straining their phone hand toward the sky, hoping to get a trickle of 3G so that they can provide a mobile hotspot to allow their surveyors to upload their completed work may want to try this. Of course you can do the same thing with a laptop, virtual machine, and router, but an Edison is a whole lot cheaper, lighter, and easier to power, not to mention something that you can leave with a local supervisor with a lot less training than someone who can operate a virtual machine on a laptop.
Here's the link to our recipe:
The bulk of the work is in the wiki instructions:
Though it works, and we (Medecins Sans Frontieres and the Missing Maps project) are already starting to use it in the field, it's still a work in progress; it takes a fair bit of concentrated attention to successfully set it up. In particular, it would be a lot more friendly if it was an integrated script that someone can simply run from their computer and set everything up on the Edison, and perhaps even better if we get a completed setup that can simply be directly flashed to an Edison.
Anyone interested in using this setup, or in helping make it a more user-friendly, feel free. All our work is open.
Onward,
Ivan Gayton
Medecins Sans Frontieres - UK and The Missing Maps