A lot of the very recent, surprising successes in hardware (Oculus, Pebble) were crowdfunded (specifically for those, Kickstarted). I would go as far to say that using a premier crowdfunding platform to test the market may be the best, lowest risk way to validate a hardware idea. Or at least crowdfunding lowers the barrier for hardware success from "damn near impossible" to "really really hard."

Less with hardware-specific expertise, more with crowdfunding, pre-sales, and bringing a product to market. Many highly-successful new hardware project launches have been powered by Tilt over the past year, to name a few: Navdy, Lytro Illum, Whistle GPS, and Eero (yesterday).

(These were all on the Tilt/Open platform: https://open.tilt.com/)

Indeed. But crowdfunding has opened up a new channel for hardware startups: preorders. It makes developing a hardware product, which used to be very difficult and take a lot of up-front investment, much more accessible. It's still difficult (see all of the infinitely-delayed crowdfunded projects), but has been getting steadily easier over the past few years. Crowdfunding serves as nondilutive financing to the startups and can also signal market validation to future investors. It is a very important part of the chain.

As others have noted, the pre-order route is often the best go to market strategy for new hardware companies, even if they have already raised a round. The buzz, evangelist community they build, feedback they receive, and the social proof they gather is often of a more lasting benefit than the pure pre-sales revenue. As others have already noted, Tilt has powered many of the recent massive hardware product launches that are going live on their own sites. More examples on https://open.tilt.com/preorders

Crowdfunding / pre-orders is definitely part of the expected business process for HW startups to launch these days.

As the first pre-order platform, Celery has powered successes like Pebble and Boosted Boards and helped them get to the next stage of their business.

The transformation over the past few years has been unreal and today is such an exciting time to be a HW startup. We personally can't wait to see what kinds of HW companies emerge next.

Yeah seems like a bit of a misfit. Check out Celery (https://www.trycelery.com/) for taking HW pre-orders. They also came out of YC. I believe they power pre-orders for guys like Pebble, August, Lockitron, Meta and Coolest Cooler etc.