By far the most challenging and rewarding class I took at U.C. Santa Cruz; the huge work load required a lot of time to be spent in the lab, the four different lab partners before the final project meant everyone worked with five or six other students during the course, which developed a real sense of camaraderie between all the students, culminating in the final competition which felt more like a celebration, not just for the completion of this class, but, with many students in the class graduating a week later, it was also a grand sending off experience.

Designing, prototyping and building the infra-red signal filter was a good example for this class. The filter was designed, then prototyped on a breadboard, and finally required to correctly identify a specific frequency signal from a sequence of signals at a minimum range. This was a difficult and particularly time consuming process, but nothing compared with the next lab which required the design to be transferred to a single, relatively small, perf-board. My partner and I ended up spending over 20 hours over a weekend soldering our filter. We had observed other students soldering many components, or even the entire circuit, before testing and debugging, and that this had caused many problems. So, we decided to test every op-amp based component when it was completed, fixing any problems and ensuring it worked as expected, before moving onto the next.