So yes, last month I gave my long-lost childhood dream a serious thought. It's about making my own electronics and robots.

As a young kid, I was bombarded with all the tech news. When I was like ten, Honda made a headline with "Honda Humaniod Robot Takes Its First Step," and then more headlines on robots, cool electronic gadgets, and more robots. I was awe-inspired by these kind of technological achievements. I was like, "Gee! I want to make one myself." Hehe.. and I remember I couldn't do anything else besides unscrewing my Chinese-made, remote-controlled toy car and looking at the wires. "Gee! So which wires to connect to turn this toy car into a robot?"

Color me stupid but not yet. And so, still as a little kid, I thought, "here is dad's 10kg video camera. Hmm.... how to put this huge thing on this little toy car so it records the video and send back to the TV?" Well, soon eough I discovered I couldn't make a robot out of a cheap Chinese toy, so yeah I crushed the toy and threw it against the walls to vent my anger. I admit, some smashed pieces of it sure looked like tiny plastic robots.

So I moved on, to something else. I soon fell in love with computers. I think I wrote about this back. You can check them out. Yeah so I moved on to the field of computing. After high school, I taught myself computer programming. Fast forwarding many years, I guess now I can create many different kinds of computer software. Software, yes! You can see a lot of buttons on the computer screen but you can't touch it. So this stuff is pretty much intangible. You can see, you can use, you can hear but you can't touch. (Your phone touch-screen display isn't real touch, nah!)

I want to touch my inventions. I want to move them around here in the real world, and I want them to move in real world. And I wonder what my inventions will smell like. I bet plastics and metals.

So there, my long-lost childhood dream came back. I didn't ignore the call this time. I vowed to make it a reality. Oh yes! I am gonna make some robots for real. Considering that I have zero knowledge on electronics, this is a leap of faith. You say, "confidence" is the right word? Darn right. So all these is based on my life-long motto, "You did it. I can do it too!" I always believe anything is possible if enough effort is put into it.

So now I'm buying a lot of tiny parts to begin with. My original budget was gonna be small like 500 bucks or less, but now, I've thrown in three grands, and I'm only seeing a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel. Two weeks of sleepless nights by browsing for the parts, three thousand dollars spent, and it is still asking for more. If the spending goes more out of control, I might have to beg on the streets. If you do see me, just give me a lot of Benjamin Franklins, okie?

Okie...  I'm still waiting for all the parts about four thousand individual parts to arrive here. Well, stay tuned. I'll post unboxing photos when I've got it.