Software

Silicon Spike is composed by two main codes:

· Communication code (see Communication Code section): is the brief code you use to send information – the stimulation parameters – to the Silicon Spike device. You can copy-paste them, and then just adjust the protocol parameters (e.g., number of TMS pulses; pause between each TMS pulse, etc.) according to your necessities.

· Main code (see Main Code section): must be uploaded on the Arduino motherboard, and doesn’t need any change. It contains all of the instructions to read the stimulation parameters sent through the communication code.

Main code

Once downloaded you just need to open it through the Arduino IDE (see here: https://www.arduino.cc/en/software ), and then upload it as it is. This code only needs to be uploaded once.

Communication code

This is the code you will use during each TMS stimulation. You can copy-paste it within your task script to fire the TMS device without relying on the computer resources. Before running the script, you need to declare the stimulation parameters.

But, before starting the code explanation, it is important to find the name of the USB port (“COM”) that you are using with the Silicon Spike device. Here, opening the Device Manager we can see that the Silicon Spike device is connected to port 3, so we declared “COM3”.