Amateur still has his robot dreams

It would have been standard for many boys and girls in Hong Kong - parents nagging them to stop reading comics or watching cartoons and do something useful.

But for Arnold Wu King-lok, Japanese animation was the inspiration for a life-long passion for building electronic robots. Wu's favourite is the Juohmaru series, and it is one of his aims to build a robot based on the character. Juohmaru is a fictional model robot in a 1983 Japanese television series, Plawres Sanshiro.

What impressed Wu about the series was the main character's ability to control his robot with a notebook computer, so he vowed to build a similar prototype.

A quarter of a century has passed but the 36-year-old still has the same goal. In 2008, he set up a workshop in Kwun Tong, where he and a couple of dozen other enthusiasts gave vent to their passion.

Wu beams with pride as he displays a small army of his robots, each meticulously hand-assembled and fitted with dozens of servo motors and integrated-circuit chips connected by bundles of colourful cables. One of these, probably Wu's favourite, is imposing and menacing, with a pair of eye-like LEDs.

Wu says his hobby is fairly affordable as each figure costs a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars to build. And the components can be reused to build new models.