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[armstrongsubero]

The course was okay, I took 4 days between working full time. I have a passion for hardware though and love electronics, so I may be a little biased. I thought it was adequate for a UL course, but too heavily text based. Some of the question on the quizzes were tricky, just a few typos here and there. Though I already made my own CPU, the final assignment to create one in Logisim was difficult, you have to design your own CPU, the ALU was easy but the course provided almost no knowledge on the Control Unit so I tried something for the final project. You also have to design your own assembly language and write programs with it. I felt the course did not cover enough to design your own assembly language, but I did what I could.

The course was about 6/10 in terms of difficulty for me. Not impossible, but not easy. I got 87% in the final preliminary results, which was a bit disappointing, the final was easy compared to the quizzes.

As long as I get like 40% on the final project I will pass, so hopefully I get some marks. I learned a lot and I only got through it in 4 days because I have been playing with electronics since I was 8. Flip flops, Schmitt triggers, binary all that stuff is in my domain, so that part of the course was easiest for me. There are some parts that are easy (distributed, parallel computing etc) and is like common IT knwoledge that anyone who worked in industry will know. Some parts however are a bit obscure and you wont come across outside the course, so I learnt a lot from the course.

I was also glad I just finished the discrete math course as it helped a little with understanding some of the more complex logic topics (simplifying, k-maps etc), so I recommend doing the discrete math course first.

Overall I say if you tinkered with electronics (op amps, 4011s etc), programming C or Assembly (PIC, AVR, STM8) and are comfortable with propositions and simplifying logic expressions you will do okay. For anyone else I HIGHLY recommend you do the discrete math course first and read the book "Digital Electronics: Principles, Devices and Applications" I read the book a few years back and thankfully I did as I referenced it in the final project. And though I used assembly already I did struggle with the writing programs with the assembly language I designed.

Hope this helps someone, honestly I think this is one of the more difficult courses I have done. DEFINITELY deserves that UL designation.

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I hoped that final assignment could have been in VHDL or Verilog! I would have nailed it.