Um… It’s a clock. It tells you what time it is. I can imagine their further investigation of the kid’s belongings…
‘What’s this yellow thing? A weapon?’
‘It’s a pencil.’
‘Come on! You can do better than that!’
‘Um… It’s a Number 2 pencil. You write with it.’
'Explain this yellow thing! :eek: :mad: ’
But no, there’s no racism here. I’m sure if a White, nerdy, Christian kid built a clock, he’d be arrested too. I think that it’s just that the wingnuts are afraid of clocks. They remind them that their time is running out.
I’m not sure what the kid thinks he’s doing? the photos show commercially made circuit boards. scavenged from junk devices he must have found. He’s not actually building circuits from what I see. At most he’s wiring together old circuit boards to make something new. I was in electronics service for years and can’t see how he’d get it to work.
One of the work study students in my college computer lab made a computer in a drawer. mounted the power supply, motherboard, plugged in his expansion cables and hard drive all in the desk drawer. he had cardboard to insulate everything from shorting out. pretty cool. Thats sort of what this kid is doing. just hooking up circuit boards he’s scavenged .
Trying to grasp the mentality here: a nice kid with a bent towards electronics does a little home experimentation, proudly brings it to school, and shows it to a teacher–and gets arrested???
I hope the family sues the school district. I would love to hear the under-oath explanations. Seriously, nobody could call their brother-in-law who’s a digital design engineer and get an informed opinion?? How are these people smart enough to be teaching anything?
Sheesh. I built a digital frequency counter when I first got introduced to the technology, just 'cause I thought it was a cool challenge. I suppose the cops will be here any minute.
Now, I have removed components from circuit boards to reuse. like the ic chips from the late 1980’s. they can be useful if you can find the data sheet for them. learn the pin out. then they can be reused in a newly designed circuit.
todays chips are much harder to deal with. one chip might have 30 or more leads, each not much bigger than a hair. no way can a chip like this be unsoldered and removed without ruining it.
the kid needs a mentor to work with him on projects. learn circuit design and encourage him.
the school and the police were idiots for confusing a homemade clock with a bomb. I hope maybe an internship somewhere opens up. Somewhere his interest in electronics gets encouraged.
It’s an injustice that he had to go through that, it would be a tragedy if it would ruin his love for creating things.
You know what needs to happen? Someone should start one of those donation/funding drives to buy the kid a complete electronics kit. Soldering station, oscilloscope, components, logic probe, etc, etc…
Even if he was wearing a turban and screaming “Death to America” is so painfully obvious that the device is not a bomb that no adult should have believed otherwise. The fact that teachers, administrators, and law enforcement believed that this could be perceived as a bomb is troubling.
The official line at the moment seems to be that it was a “hoax bomb.” His saying repeatedly that it was nothing but a clock somehow proved it was a hoax bomb, thus justifying his detention and suspension.
(And I’m pretty sure Benghazi was a factor as well.)
My 11-year old loves taking apart old electronics and trying to make new things out of them (usually this involves hooking up motors and fans and LEDs to batteries). I’ve been encouraging his experimentation, but now I find I’ve been harboring a terrorist! Or would be, anyway, if his skin were a few shades darker.
As an electronics hobbyist, practical joker and all around PITA in high school, I built and took things to class that would probably bring down a Homeland Security raid today. A clock that vaguely resembled a bomb timer? Kee-rist, I build a box that shocked people when they picked it up. Had loads of fun with it. Then there was shining the laser (a new, rare toy) all the way across the quad to create shiny, fuzzy glowing balls in front of metal door plates and such.
