Building

Can I build/buy one ?

Some people sell ready-made and tested Proxmark3's, such as http://proxmark3.com/. As these are made from very small production runs, the devices are not cheap, and run in the region of 400$. Actually there is no way to know the size of the actual Proxmark3 'market' and whether resellers do sell a lot of devices or not. Sometimes in the forum a group buy pops up and you can save money. If you are lucky enough you can buy low cost used proxmark3 from ebay.

You can also try to do everything yourself : all the sources including HW design are Open Source, so you can send gerber files to your favorite online PCB manufacturer & get a quotation. Then you will either need advanced soldering skills to solder everything onto the Proxmark3 yourself - remember, we are talking full CMS and narrow pin spacing chips - or send the boards + components to specialized fab houses who will populate them for you. How expensive ? No experience with this.

Very good examples of building a Proxmark3 yourself are shown on this and this page and some pics can be found here. Read it and then decide how you want to play it ! What tools do I need ?

If you want to build a proxmark3 yourself, then you should not need any explanation on the tools needed to do this. If you do, you are probably out of your depth already, no offense :-)

When running the device, at the very least you will need :

• A USB/mini-USB cable
• A soldering iron, enamel wire and skills to make your own antenna(s)
• A Linux or Windows PC to run the client
• Quite possibly a JTAG probe to get back on your feet should you break something in the Proxmark3 software-wise. Building tips Hirose connector

The Hirose antenna connector for the Proxmark3 is actually very easy to build for cheap : you just need to look for "hirose usb cable" on google to find pre-built Hirose cables for 4 to 8 euros a piece. In the antenna section, you can actually see how to use such as Hirose USB cable to build a nice HF antenna.