DIY Laser levelling using webcam and laser level

[devmonkey]

The cheapest are definitely these plastic grate things, the glass cylinders are much more, then the powel lens are about twice as much again. I think the cylinder is the best choice as the powel is designed to remove the gaussian beam intensity which for our purposes is extremely useful.

The self levelling laser i'm using is 1.3mW and has two lasers each with a cylindrical glass lens. 1.3mW is very weak compared to what you can buy online. Probably wants to be low power to avoid potentially damaging the cmos camera sensor.

If you want something that definitely works pick up a broken Dewalt DW088 on ebay. These seem to fail whereby one or other of the lasers becomes very dim, this is down to the driver board failing, so I would expect the lasers still work perfectly and can be scavenged.