Don’t Try this At Home, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Edition

What happened

As odd as it sounds, it’s actually very well studied and works often enough that it has been approved by regulatory agencies as real evidence based medicine. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is one of those things that seems too wacky to be true.

It’s also now open source (published so anyone may read, use and change the code), thanks to the OpenTMS project by [Zach McGinty] . Though since its not approved by the FDA or your local authority, be very aware of [Zach]’s disclaimer that this is not a medical device and if you do build something based on the extensive data on his GitHub, you do so at your own risk.

He’s got plans for the coils that go next to your head — made of hollow copper pipe to carry coolant, just like the pros do it — and the power supply to pulse them with mind-altering amounts of electricity. That might be literal in this case, but it’s also a hefty power supply: a pair of microwave oven transformers, switched through IGBTs in a flyback configuration.