<p>Thin films, nowadays much explored domain and near ubiquitous, due to the availability of variety of coating materials and a number of advanced coating techniques, have a great impact on modern era of scientific and technological development. Some exotic and fascinating applications of thin film coatings (TFC), currently, are coatings on ultra-low loss dielectric mirrors and beam splitters for gravitational wave detectors at LIGO, gas sensing, accelerator coatings (coatings for LHC and CLIC experiments at CERN. A number of physical and chemical deposition techniques such as thermal vapour deposition, sputtering techniques, chemical vapour deposition, atomic layer deposition, spin and dip coating etc. are used widely for the deposition. The method of sol–gel based dip coating is found to be versatile, among other available TFC practices. For the same, an inexpensive and simple dip coating device is developed and fabricated. The detailed construction is discussed in the paper. The automation of this dip coating device is achieved with the opensource technology (Arduino based microcontroller and motor driver) including the graphical user interface development using python. Subsequently, the developed device is used to deposit the undoped and Fe doped ZnO thin films on glass substrates at the immersion and emersion speed of 4&#xa0;mm/sec and the transmission properties of the deposited thin films are studied with UV–Vis Spectrophotometer in the visible region. An enhancement of approximately 8–10%, in the transmission is achieved with the 5% of Fe doping, while the further doping of 8% has found to deteriorate the crystal quality of the film.</p> Graphical abstract <p></p>