Very poorly done course, boring lectures, very little context and practical motivations, quizzes that require rote memorization. I would recommend University of California, Irvine for basics on embedded systems, they have actual tutorials on Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, with a much more engaging lecturer. For something more in-depth perhaps Edx's Embedded Systems - Shape the world, which is taught using the TM4C123G development board. Otherwise there are many other great books/resources out there.

Lots of mistakes and unclear instructions, No response even after complaining in the forum

Main issues I encountered in the course:

- many videos end with a suggestion to "refer to the suggested materials for more information". Which are these materials, and where can they be found?

- the slides could use some diagrams here and there, as the constant text screens are monotonous and make understanding harder in some cases

- the course does not settle on a balance between breadth and depth of information. Some aspects are presented at a very high level, yet using very specialised terminology and concepts. For instance, context switching when describing the disadvantages of microkernels, or pre-emptively scheduled systems - I have a CS background and had no problem with these aspects, but I am aware I am highly subjective. It's a case of "chicken and egg", where if you understand the low level concepts you probably don't need the course, and if you don't understand them you also can't understand the high level concepts.

- At the end of the Week 3 videos describing the three OSs, it is said "In order to know the details on how to write a program and run applications in Riot/Contiki/TinyOS, please come back to our lectures who have more detailed videos."

Which lectures are these, and where can they be found?

- the only practical exercises in the course (Week 4) are only vaguely related to the course's targets

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All this being said, it is an ok introduction to the embedded OS world, if you bring your own CS and OS background knowledge.

Good content, bad organization.

I enjoyed watching the videos and reading through the materials to extend my knowledge about this topic. Unfortunately most of the assignments are not very clear and/or even contain mistakes.

I also had to wait several weeks before my submissions got reviewed.

Overall I learned some interesting stuff but got quite frustrated about the bad organization and the lack of feedback from the instructor. This course definitely needs an update from the creators!

Well, I thank the teacher and his team for the effort to make the course available.

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So, the course is not intermediate or beginner level.

If you know something about embedded system:

It's a good reminder with a bunch of topics that are only quoted and not explained in depth. No topic goes deeper, you have to do it by yourself it's like "Embedded systems can be classified as to dependability ( reliable, safe, secure, maintanable, etc), now go by yourself and search for it."

If you know nothing about embedded system:

Probably you are to feel a little bit effort and you're going to make a hard effort to understand something. Classes will be like " In the world there are processors, microcontroller, FPGA, ASIC and they have certain things(SRAM, peripherals, etc) and then you use them to build aerospace avionics, good look.

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Improvement

The course should use more drawings ( flowchart, diagram), it would be much more understandable. Too many topics you can't bring to the real world.

The course has a nice tittle. But, I wish this course was seperated in longer modules or courses, because there are too many topics for very few time... so you wont learn anything really solid.

for instance:

1- Designing embedded - Raise requirements for project based on real project ( eg. temperature and humidity sensor to work battery powered, show information in a display the information of temp and humidity. Must be reliable, safe, low power consumption ) and so on. Learn how to search for components, price, availability, datasheet.

2 - FPGA - How to implement the project above using a platform ( or at least simulation). Program in VHDL or Verilog.

3 - Processor - ...

4 - MCU - ...

5 - Building firmware in C - Develop firmware without OS. Use state machines of things like that

6 - Build firmware with an OS.

7 - Drawing PCB - Ariiise board!!!

So, I just gave an idea I do not know how difficult would it be to bring to reality

Not bad, but here are some things to be improved... Cons: most of the videos are quite like "There are a lot of interesting things here and there, read the documentation to learn more". Also, several links are broken. Assignment for week 4 are quite unexplained, what to do and why. There is no hands on examples in video material, only pretty confusing theory.

I wasn't very happy.

The subject material was very shallow; brief overviews of some aspects of the material with repeated references to "suggested materials" that didn't actually exist.

Even at the level of detail presented, there was a lot of info on slides that did not appear in the transcripts. It would have been useful to have the slides be downloadable.

I didn't like the design of the quizzes; this might be a coursera thing (I've seen the same thing in other classes), but the inclusion of 5 subparts of a one-point question meant no "partial credit", making a "5-question" quiz (with 20-odd things to get wrong/right) a lot more difficult to pass than they should have been. (In other MOOCs, I've seen such multi-part questions handled by having the question as a whole be worth 5 points (for a 5-subpart question), and you get a point awarded for each subpart you get right, and not awarded for each one you get wrong (whether it should have been checked and wasn't or should have been not-checked and was.)

There was no interaction with "staff" on the class forums. The "extra thought" topics were simplistic and only barely related to the class materials, and the participation that happened was ... poor, like people thought they were getting points for "taking part" even if all they said was "I don't know."

The professor seemed to have some strong opinions about "controversial" subjects, presented as facts, that I happen to disagree with, and didn't really have any supporting material. (The big one for me was "FPGAs are lower power than MCUs." Which I asked about on the forums, and was never answered. But also several several cases of "the advantage of XX os is that it has small memory requirements", followed nearly immediately by several examples of other OSes described as even smaller.)

Finally, for a 4-week class where the first 3 weeks have only short quizzes, I thought the "week 4" assignment: "download a VM and set up Contiki/cooja, write two programs and get them both peer reviewed by the end of the week" was unrealistic. Especially without "supported matierals", tutorials on setup, or even copies of the sketchy instructions on the slides in the video. (I might not have been awful, given an extra week to complete. I gave up, though.) (existing forum message from a prior iteration of the class says "don't use contiki 3.0 like the instructor talks about, or even 2.7 that he mentions. Go all the way back to 2.6.1...")

There was some interesting stuff there. The lack of "suggested materials" and downloadable slides were the biggest problems.

it was very good introduction about ES hardware and good information about IOT Operating system

I think this course is for somebody with intermediate level of understanding. It does discuss basics in the first week but i think it need to me more structured. Later in the course you will learn about various OS and their benefits. Some of the concepts were very new for me. Still it just skims through diffrernt operating systms But i think the course need to be restructured. There should be emphasis on deploying on real hardware. PREREQUISITES: linux os understanding, Make file understanding , understanding the relative paths in make file is a must for getting the assignments right.

Also the forum is almost Dead.

Good basic introduction about hardware and operating systems for embedded systems in general. But the hands-on exercises are at least partly build on outdated instructions on how to setup development environments leading to errors during the setup steps which is frustrating for students just starting to get into the topic.

NOT GOOD..REALLY BORING

Course was very interesting . This course helped me to get a idea of how IoT works . Only problem faced was using the contiki OS. If proper guidance for using Cooja Simulator was provided then it would be more interesting.

The videos and the instructor are very nice.

The quizzes have questions with totally unrelated answers, leading to guesswork.

One of the final assignments is very complex and hard to understand what has to be done. Also, the final assignments have missing links in the PDF instructions.

In general, the ideas of the course and the assignments are very interesting, but this course needs to be urgently reviewed.

I do not recommend this course if you want to be taught intuitively. The slides are mostly just a list of bullet points, with very few intuitive figures or charts (normally figures/charts are easier to understand and remember, even the simple ones). You are just fed with lots of concepts throughout the course. But in the end, you are suddenly required to do some practical C programming in Contiki (an embedded OS), which you need to spend some time to figure out quite a number of practical issues just for a successful run.

Poor documentation and guidance on assignments. Information taught in this course can be found available through a simple google search. Wasted my time with this course and the specialization.

Very long talking, no graphical explanation, discussion forums not answered. HORRIBLE. I hope next courses of the specialization will be better

was not good at all and i did not gain any experience thanks for wasting my time

In first three weeks the topics covered are not covered in much detail, but it is good enough to get started, and you can learn about that topics from other sources. The reason I am giving such a low rating to this course was, first I expected much more in depth knowledge and wide coverage of topics, and secondly the most important reason is that the week 4 of course sucks, there is no detail, no sources to understand topics, the forums are down right dead and there is no help from the staff (TAs) and faculty, the assignments of week 4 are not clear in terms of what to do and how to do, and it is very difficult to find relevant information on-line. In my opinion you should take this course only when:

1) You already have a clear understanding of C, OS concepts.

2) You are ready to search on-line for the topics taught even when you have no idea where you should start.

3) You have zero expectations from TAs and forums.

The course is very generic overview of embedded hardware and operating systems. Too many OS' have been covered in a very short time without going into actual details of any of them. Assignments are full of error and have little relation to the lecture material. Assignment 4 is completely out of scope. Would not recommend.

Rather shallow course. Kinda OK as an overview for embedded operating systems, but that's it. Practical part is really badly organized. Materials for peer-graded assignments have errors like not working or missing links, and those errors are not being fixed for years! Assignments are formal and boring.