The World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) classifies CaPVs as notifiable disease agents, and molecular diagnostic tests play an important role in monitoring the spread of these viruses in susceptible livestock. A range of conventional agarose‐gel‐based polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays (Ireland and Binepal, 1998; Heine et al., 1999; Markoulatos et al., 2000; Tuppurainen et al., 2005; Zheng et al., 2007), or real‐time PCR assays (Balinsky et al., 2008; Bowden et al., 2008; Stubbs et al., 2012) are used in diagnostic laboratories. However, poorly equipped laboratories often face difficulties accessing these molecular techniques (particularly real‐time PCR) that are reliant upon expensive and relatively fragile equipment. In particular, the ability to perform nucleic acid‐based tests such as PCR in field settings has proven to be a challenging goal largely due to the reliance upon pre‐processing of samples (nucleic acid extraction), the lack of stable reagents that are suitable for use in environments where it is not possible to maintain a cold chain (King et al., 2008) and the cost of the field equipment. The Enigma Field Laboratory (FL) is a hardware platform which undertakes nucleic acid extraction, PCR thermocycling and analysis of data without user intervention, which has been applied for the detection of other notifiable diseases such as foot‐and‐mouth disease (Madi et al., 2012). The aim of this study was to optimize and evaluate a mobile PCR platform for the simple detection of CaPV DNA.