I like the idea of this class - a lab where we can learn how to program FPGAs and learn about how to apply this to real world problems. However, this course feels extremely poorly supported. The Professor, Sarafzadeh, shows no interest in teaching for the course, which negatively impacts the quality of the material covered by the course. The class is given access to Vivado 2018.2, which is extremely old by modern software standards, and we're given Basys 3 FPGAs, which are so underpowered as to prevent us from implementing many interesting capstone project ideas. Using a modern software and a modern FPGA would enable us to implement modern projects like machine learning projects, but in the current state it's essentially impossible. I don't think this class in its current state should be considered a capstone. I think it would be best for the department to consider upgrading its software and hardware components for this class and have the professor take a more hands-on approach to teaching a course. CS M152B theoretically should be our most important class as students at UCLA, but in practice is one of the most poorly supported. This is in no way a problem caused by our TA, who is incredibly supportive. This class is fundamentally broken, and he is in no position to be able to fix it. This needs to be fixed by a professor who desires to teach a good capstone.

Completely disorganized, hardware and drivers don't work, expectations unclear, timeline and due dates unclear, no help from instructors on anything.

Sorry to say, but this class is so f**ked up. Boards and computers are broken. Specs and instructions are often unclear, wrong or incomplete. Most of time in the lab is wasted on unnecessary debugging or resource searching, and no one knows what's going on. If things are not properly prepared, probably they should've kept it online for the entire quarter. Or, even better, just cancel this class because it's a complete waste of time and torturing on students.

This lab is the absolute worst. I find it worse than 111 and 131. To be working with software that has problems that you can't even begin to debug because there's just so much bullshit and kinks they never worked out with the software. Also, poor guidance and misleading instructions during the time I took it in summer (I have not even finished the course yet and I can write this review) which led to longer pointless hours in the lab. I spent about 70% of my summer in the lab, 20% in other classes, and 10% with free time during weekdays AND weekends.