Overall one of my favorite professors. He doesn't use slides or record lectures, so if you want to do well, show up to lecture and take notes. But he explains everything very well and simplifies it. Like another review said, I also found it very helpful when he would design a controller from scratch to reinforce the material we had learned in the past couple of weeks. This class is mostly about designing controllers, and there is a somewhat straightforward process of trial and error, and tests you need to run to get it working. The midterm was fair, but harder than the final to be honest. They were both graded extremely leniently, and lots of partial credit. The project was the one downside to this class. The class is about linear systems, but your controller has to work for a non-linear system (a process he explains in ~week 4 and never visits again), but the project is assigned in week 7 or 8. I feel as though the project could have been assigned a bit earlier (around week 6) after going over the Root Locus lectures, since after that, you basically know everything to start the project. The project took an extremely long time to do, but it was also graded leniently. Homework was straight out of the textbook and he answers very similar problems to the homework every week during recorded Zoom office hours. Overall a great professor with a good sense of humor and very interesting class

Strengths: lectures were very clear and engaging, felt comfortable asking questions. I like the lectures which Tabuada ties our knowledge into real world modeling/application.

Weakness: project. The project requirements are vague and needs to be clarified. Further requirements such as forbidding us from using derivative/PID blocks need to be communicated in writing, in email and/or BruinLearn announcement (I found out about this through other students, which shows poor communication on the instructors part). More instructor support would have greatly helped the project, but there were no discussion sections nor even TA office hours (partly due to strike, which I wouldn't hold against the TA, but ECE department in general needs to give students more TA support!).

FUCK TABUADA
He writes teeny tiny and speaks super softly so it's impossible to understand what's going on in lecture. You have to read the textbook.
His project is unnecessary and annoyingly long and hard. This is a class on linear controls but your controller had to work for a nonlinear system. Also the spec is super unclear and he and the TA kept on making up new constrains for our project up until the due date. I think I had to redo that shit like 5 times.
His midterm questions made no sense.
His final questions made no sense.
His grading scheme is unforgiving.
He doesn't accept homework that is 1 femtosecond late and is incredibly heartless with his late work policy.
All in all, fuck Tabuada.

This class is very theoretical, and a lot of the time will feel like a math class with limited application to electrical engineering. I personally found the material to be pretty dry, but the concepts thankfully weren't too convoluted. A big portion of the class is just about roots and stability of systems.

Tabuada isn't the best lecturer in the sense that he speaks incredibly softly and his handwriting is difficult to read, but he will take a lot of time going over examples. He explains concepts fairly clearly, and is helpful when answering questions. There was one lecture where he just spent the entire 2 hours going over multiple examples to demonstrate a new topic.

The homework is straight from the textbook, and while there aren't many problems assigned, they can take a while. I found that the homework problems sometimes would seem a little unrelated to the lecture, and there was sometimes a lot of confusion about how to do certain problems. The TAs will go over similar questions during discussion, but won't explicitly help out with the homework question itself.

The class has a midterm, final, project, and weekly homework. The project was designing a control system with Simulink. The spec is INCREDIBLY unclear, and due to the timing of the project being due close to finals week, it was very stressful trying to get it done. It's very likely that the first few times reading the spec, you will have no idea what to do for it. He makes class into office hours the last few lectures, so make sure to ask questions about the project. I found the project to be frustrating and needlessly time intensive.

The midterm and final were only a few questions each, with many parts per question. I found the midterm to be much easier than the final. Both were pretty reasonable, and understanding the homework, as well as doing some extra practice, would well prepare you for them.

Overall, I'd recommend taking this class if you aren't sure what you want with your core courses. It isn't unreasonably difficult, and Tabuada has a very generous grading scheme (with no downcurve). However, I have yet to meet a single person who actually enjoyed the class material, though its more due to the dry nature of controls than Tabuada himself.

Professor Tabuada is a really nice guy and is good at explaining the difficult control system topics. He doesn't have the best handwriting but he is always receptive to writing neater. He also doesn't talk very loud, and doesn't use a mic, so it's best if you sit up front to hear and see what's on the board. He is always open to questions and clarifications. He does a lot of examples in class and is good at explaining the concepts. The homeworks are from the textbooks. The midterm was a bit of a time crunch, but the final was reasonable. Definitely do the practice midterm and final that he releases. The project for this class is reasonable, but the spec is unclear, so you'll have to ask a lot of questions and definitely start early. Control systems in general are tough concepts, but this class is definitely interesting. The class also will have a nice curve.

141 is an interesting class with many cool topics covered. However, Tabuada's lectures can often be confusing and unclear, and it was usually more helpful to read the textbook for the relevant section. If I were to take it again, I would definitely wait to take this class with another professor.

Prof. Tabuada is very nice and funny. He covers up to frequency compensation and a brief introduction to digital control, which I've heard is less than teachers such as Shoarinejad. He explains the material carefully and logically, and takes questions and is pretty funny. His handwriting can be a bit hard to read occasionally, as he write on a tablet. The grading scale is very generous. I dont think his tests were incredibly hard. The frequency compensation stuff was pretty confusing though. Definitely take this class if you are into circuits, since circuit design of feedback amplifiers are very important. Highly reccomend.

I took this class because I thought it would be a cool elective with a pretty lenient grading scheme. But I ended up finding the material for this class to be pretty dry and uninteresting. For the most part this class is pretty mathematical and abstract. If you liked stuff like 102 or 113 maybe this class is for you. But if you like classes more grounded in application and less about mathematical theory you're probably gonna be disappointed.

That being said, the grading for this class did end up being pretty lenient. Don't take this to mean the class itself is easy though. The material isn't a cakewalk to understand, and the exams (especially the final) were kinda rough, and easy to mess up on. Be ready to tackle seemingly random physics questions on the exams too. The homeworks also tended to be rather confusing and would take a while.

Lastly, Tabuada as a professor is pretty helpful and very receptive to answering any questions students have. He even does MATLAB demos, which pretty much no other EE professor does. However, his lectures aren't particularly engaging, and they can be pretty hard to follow at times. His handwriting is also kind of confusing and not easy to make sense of, so that doesn't help much. Ultimately, I didn't find lectures sufficient to understand the material, so watching youtube videos and looking over homework solutions is what ended up getting me through it.

Overall, an average class. I didn't really enjoy it, but there are worse classes you could take.

I found 141 to be an interesting class, especially as we neared the end and a shift in focus to design explained why we chose to study these topics. That said, I wish that shift had come earlier. The pace of the class felt very slow, although that didn't correspond to a solid understanding of what we were doing until I started watching youtube videos (all hail, Brian Douglas).
Tabuada was solid - could be a bit hard to follow, and frequently spoke without writing, but he made sense, he did examples, he didn't move to fast, and his grading was incredibly lenient (at least with this set of TA's). Would recommend.
HW was super helpful for understanding what we were working on in class, and the final project was interesting and relevant to COVID, but also painful in the number of approximations (that made little sense outside the scope of the project) you had to make for it to be manageable.

I took this class during Spring 2020, so COVID and stuff. 141 is overall an okay class. There's a bit of Physics 1A that you need to remember for the equations of motion (question on this on both midterm and final). I would consider that everything in this class is challenging, but doable. The final project for us was modelling coronavirus in Simulink (very apt for this quarter), which I thought was pretty doable for a final project. The only thing that saves ur grade for this class is his very generous grading curve. You only need an 87.5% to get an A, a 81.25% for an A-, and a 75% for a B. However, we didn't have the EC project that other classes seemed to have