The claim is that the device looked like a bomb. That he's being charged with "creating a hoax bomb" makes no difference to this. Either a hoax bomb still looks like a bomb, or we're giving control over to idiots to declare that a hoax bomb is anything that looks like their crazy and inaccurate ideas of what a bomb looks like.

Certainly IEDs can have exposed PCBs. So do hard drives. It's irrelevant.

What do explosives look like? I don't know. But I know that they look like something, and they probably don't look like electronics. So when you have a device that is a bunch of electronics and nothing else, I can pretty safely say that it does not look like a bomb, because there are no explosives.