Open-source tools for the fabrication and characterization of organic electronics

By promoting collaborative sharing of knowledge, the open-source movement has catalyzed substantial progress across diverse fields, including software development and artificial intelligence. Similarly, the concept of openly shared hardware has gained attention, due to its cost-effectiveness and the prospect of improved reproducibility. A major motivation for the development of organic electronics is its promise to deliver substantial advantages in price and manufacturability relative to its inorganic counterpart. Here, two open-source tools for organic electronics are introduced: a dip-coating device designed for thin film fabrication and a four-point probe for precisely measuring the resistance of thin films. These tools only cost a fraction of comparable commercial devices and run with open-source software to ensure a user-friendly experience. A case study demonstrates the optimization of simple fluorescent organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) using these open-source tools achieving 4% external quantum efficiency (EQE). To characterize these OLEDs, a previously reported open-source setup for accurate efficiency measurements is used. A substantial software upgrade to this setup, which speeds up the characterization of electroluminescence, is also repor. This work contributes open-source hardware and software to the field of organic electronics, thereby lowering the entrance barrier to the field and fostering the involvement of scientists with diverse scientific backgrounds.