Here are some of the suggestions from Emile Patrone, the founder of DIY project sales site Tindie, Scott Miller, the founder of product design consulting firm Dragon Innovation, and William Hurley, the co-founder of design firm Chaotic Moon Studios. And yes, all of them recommended some sort of 3D printer, either the Form-1 that began as a Kickstarter campaign and will sell for $3,299 in April, or the MakerBot Replicator for $2,199 (because of Hurricane Sandy it looks like that won’t arrive in time for the holidays though). But like a soldering iron, I’m going to assume if your hacker recipient wants a 3D printer they already have one.

Product: Simon Says
Cost: $12.95
What you need to know: The Simon Says board is a beginner board kit that plays a light and sound-based memory game. The board plays a series of sounds and you play it back in sequence. The kit aims to teach people how to solder, and is also uses open source hardware so you can program your own light and sound combinations after you’ve maxed out the ones already programmed on the board.

Product: The Rascal
Cost: $175
What you need to know: This is a somewhat hard-to-buy gift, since they are batch-made, but the boards are basically portable (if you include a Wi-Fi radio and a battery) web servers that you can program using Python. People have used them to control any electronic device from the web. You can hook your electronic device into the board (you will probably need a shield of some sorts) and then write some code to build a web site from which you can now control the device. With the right board and shield I may be able to figure out how to control my oven from the web (yes, this is a dream of mine).

Product: Stirling Engine Model
Cost: $129
What you need to know: The product description says this is beautiful as well as a lesson in thermodynamics, and who wouldn’t want a desk-side sculpture that also doubles as a physics experiment? Plus you have to make it! As paperweights go the replica of a Stirling Engine, (there’s one inside a Segway) shows you how to convert an external heat source into motion via a fan, car and generator experiment. Outrage your steampunk friends with a more alternative engine.

Product: Electric Imp Breakout
Cost: $19.95
What you need to know: The Electric Imp guys have the ambitious goal of bringing Wi-Fi to everything using an SD-style card that you can plug into a variety of gadgets, appliances or even lamps. then you program those elements via a web-based service. You can’t get the easy-to-use version of the products yet, but you can buy a breakout board and build your own connected product if you’re so inclined.

Product: ExtraCore
Cost: $10.50
What you need to know: A lot of people buy Arduino boards and share them between projects. This makes sense because those boards containing the logic processors can be expensive. The downside is that you may have a lot of half-complete projects waiting around for a board to make it work. ExtraCore is a kit that can power your project for a third of the cost of an Arduino board. The key to this board is that it’s small and Looks just like Arduino Uno to the integrated developer environment.

Product: Twine
Cost: $99
What you need to know: Connecting stuff to the Internet is pretty much an essential step in many DIY projects, and Twine makes is easy enough that I can do it. The product is a rubberized self-contained sensor pack that also has a Wi-Fi radio that outputs to a web site. The Twine web app reflects what the sensors see in real time, so you can than write a little program telling Twine that when X happens it should take an action that might send info to a web page, to an email, to Twitter or to the Pebble Smart watch.

Product: The 2WD Rovera Arduino Robot Kit
Cost: $174.99
What you need to know: Who doesn’t want to build a friendly little robot to play with and/or help you in your plans for world domination. The kit includes everything you need to build a two-wheeled robot including the motor shield board, wheels and wires. It’s unclear if you can add a sensor that would allow you to program the robot to look soulfully at you and say, “No disassemble.”

Product: MiniStylophone Kit
Cost: $9:50
What you need to know: This is a kit for beginners that will allow them to play music and record sounds for later playback. The kit requires the recipient to solder 24 resistors to the board, so make sure your recipient has a soldering iron. When done you use a stylus to play the music on the stylophone. You can hook it into other projects or annoy your friends and parents.

Product: Membership to a hack space
Cost: It varies, but can range from $99 to $175 per month.
What you need to know: There are myriad places where like-minded DIYers can get together and take classes, use equipment and store their projects from the Artisan’s Asylum in Boston to TechShop which has spaces in the Bay Area, Austin, Detroit and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. For a listing of other popular places check out the Hackerspaces Wiki.

Product: Gamby
Cost: $25
What you need to know: This is a limited edition Arduino shield to combine with an Arduino board to make a mobile gaming console. It has a monochrome LCD screen and four-way directional pad for that up-up-down-down gameplay. The games are already in your head, so get coding and start playing them on your very own hardware. Great gift for a special proposal or an awesome product to make with your kids.

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Almost two weeks in, Adapteva, which is trying to bring an alternative chip architecture to the masses, is only a third of the way toward its funding goal. Xi3, a rethink of computer motherboard and chassis design, has raised only $27,468 of $250,000 with 18 days also left to go. Meanwhile, projects associated with the Internet of Things have topped their goals and other toy tech-related projects are also doing well.

Kickstarter can help niche hardware succeed

While this could easily turn into a piece wondering what type of hardware plays well with the Kickstarter crowd, I’m wondering how really geeky projects such as Adapteva’s 16 and 64-core supercomputer systems on a chip or even a slightly more consumer-friendly modular computer from Xi3 should use the platform. Perhaps Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen can share more on this when he speaks at our RoadMap conference on Nov. 5 in San Francisco.

The Adapteva Epiphany 16-core chip.

One could argue that both Adapteva and Xi3 are examples of Kickstarter fueling a niche market the big guys won’t touch, as a blog post by Robert Fabricant of Frog Design suggests, or that it is a last-ditch effort to succeed.

Fabricant wrote in his post “Kickstarter Rescues Startups That VCs Won’t Touch, But Here’s What’s Missing:”

Product design is governed by the laws of supply and demand. There is a tremendous supply of talent, yet very few products actually make it to market. So most designers have a huge stockpile of high-fidelity concepts and beautiful renderings gathering dust. While a number of these concepts turn up on Core77 and Co.Design, they have zero paths to market. Now you can argue that we don’t need another slab phone/pad with a slightly different chamfer or bezel. But there are a whole host of neglected device categories desperate for attention, like watches, bathroom scales, and thermostats. These devices feel woefully out of sync in an iProduct world. Perhaps the biggest service that Kickstarter has done is to reinvigorate these categories to the point where bigger players might see their potential and escape from “Slab Land.”

These projects fit in with Fabricant’s theme of Kickstarter being a good home for niche products that big vendors don’t want to touch or innovate, or even new chip architectures. Because of the large economies of scale required to get and keep the cost low enough, the computing world leaves a lot of room for smaller projects. The big challenge for the Xi3 guys and even Adapteva will be whether they can match their Kickstarter price to the market demand in a way that allows them to survive and innovate.

Forget funding, Kickstarter as a marketing platform

Namely, can Kickstarter generate the margins needed for a full-on production manufacturing schedule at smaller scale, or the margins to continue R&D for a chip? Does it have to? In the case of Xi3, the answer is a decided “No” David Politis, VP of marketing for the Salt Lake City-based Xi3, explains that the company decided to do a Kickstarter because it found the idea of crowdfunding so interesting, and it had a product to launch.

While Xi3′s Kickstarter project hasn’t been much of success from a fund-raising perspective, the company says it has gotten marketing benefits from the campaign. ”As campaigns go it has been successful,” said Politis. He says that people who have visited the project page and viewed the video are already ordering the computer from Xi3 rather than waiting for the project to close. “You have to ask at what point does a Kickstarter project become a media channel?” he said.

Xi3 has plans that go beyond its modular computer.

Adapteva and its Parallella project is in a different boat. It has turned to Kickstarter to build a market for its product after it couldn’t find continued venture-capital backing. It’s done well so far, but on Tuesday it also released its reference manuals, something CEO Andreas Olafsson said he wouldn’t do unless the project was successful. When asked if this was done to help generate more interest, a spokeswoman for Adapteva dodged the questions and said it was just something the company decided to do now.

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