Serval SAM (“Survey Acquisition Manager”) is a free and open source application for Android 2.3.3 "Gingerbread" MR1 (API level 10) or later. It uses the Open Data Kit (ODK) to capture survey form data entered by the user, and sends the captured survey data (“form instances”) to a central collection point via Rhizome.

Serval SAM works as follows:

1. The user launches the Serval SAM app and chooses a survey form from the list of configured forms
2. Serval SAM launches the ODK Collect app which presents the selected form for the user to fill in
3. When the form is completed, finalised and saved, Serval SAM packs the form instance into a Rhizome bundle which it passes to the Serval Mesh app

Serval SAM must be co-installed with the following two apps:

• ODK Collect from the Open Data Kit (ODK) project (you can download odk-collect-v1.2.2.apk and install it directly)
• Serval Mesh from The Serval Project (see the Serval Mesh page for installation instructions)

Serval SAM is currently in development, and is available as source code from the survey-acquisition-management repository on GitHub. There are no instructions for building and installing from source code, but it is a standard Android project, so the official Android training material is the best place to start.

The pre-built APK serval-sam.apk was used for the KiwiEx 2013 field exercise. You can download this and install it directly.

Before Serval SAM can be used, it must be configured with the forms that it will present to the user. Configuration is performed as follows:

1. place certain files into the /servalproject/sam/configs/ directory on the Android device
2. launch the Serval SAM app on the device
3. press the Load Configuration button
4. follow the prompts to complete the configuration

The kiwiex-2013_2012-02-22_config.sam.serval ZIP file contains a bundle of configuration files that were used for KiwiEx 2013. This ZIP file can be unpacked into the /servalproject/sam/configs/ directory to fulfil step 1 above.