Nerds Rage Over Ahmed Mohamed's Clock

From The Daily Beast:

Last week, Ahmed Mohamed’s homemade clock got him arrested and then invited to the White House. This week, the conspiracy theory backlash against his ‘invention’ begins.

The Muslim teen who became an overnight celebrity after Texas cops mistook his homemade clock for a bomb has received a White House invitation, shoutouts from Facebook, MIT, and NASA, and more than $15,000 for an academic scholarship.

But some engineers say something’s fishy about the high schooler’s invention, and the Internet has been lit aflame by claims of conspiracy.
.............................

Anthony DiPasquale, the webmaster for Artvoice.com, exposed the circuitry behind Mohamed’s clock. ......... But the self-styled electronics geek says that Mohamed’s homemade gadget is actually a factory-produced clock.
.............................

DiPasquale said all signs point to a mass-produced model. He traced the 1980s-era circuit board, which has a silk-screened “M” logo, to a vintage Micronta clock found on eBay. He noted other “dead giveaways” of a store-bought clock, including a switch to select 12- or 24-hour time and a battery backup.

“Anyone with even a basic hobby-level understanding could see it was a commercially available mass-produced product that was just taken out of its enclosure, and placed in a pencil box,” DiPasquale told The Daily Beast. “So I read some more about the story, and nowhere did I see anybody actually bring that point up.”

So one has to ask, why did the kid do it?