What are the best practices for developing a hardware product without resources or skills?

There's no reason GE Aviation, or anyone, would be excited about your "idea for a hoverboard", or give you credit in any way, because you yourself say that you can't contribute anything to the project intellectually, financially, or otherwise, and the idea itself is not a new one. The idea was popularized in the 1989 movie Back to the Future Part II, and there are currently several people using their own skills to try to make commercially viable hoverboards (e.g. https://youtu.be/588du55BcAY?t=463 and https://youtu.be/588du55BcAY?t=31 and https://youtu.be/588du55BcAY?t=110) So your only real option is either to learn the skills to create a prototype yourself, or to have some insightful, patented idea on a unique approach, or to have enough money to pay someone else to do all that for you.

First thing to do is to research other crowdfunding sites other than the big two as neither was really meant to raise funds for startup businesses. I would suggest something in the nature of www.crowdfunder.com or www.seedinvest.com might better suit your needs.

What I usually do with my team is to store the data locally until the machine connects to the web and then push it to the cloud at that point. The data won't be live but at least it will appear once the PC is online. Makes sense?

There are two main standards, the UL (USA's "Underwriter's Laboratory"), and CE (European Union's "Conformité Européenne"). The CE will let you sell in the US, Canada, Australia, and the EU (I'm not sure about the Middle East though). The CE is harder to get than the UL, since it includes standards of safety and functionality, while the UL only includes standards of safety. You can find the UL standards here: http://ulstandards.ul.com/access-standards/ and here are instructions for the CE standards: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ce-marking if you'd like further assistance with what specific standards would work with your product, and/or assistance with US patenting let me know, all the best, Lee

Hello, I'm sure everyone has their own approach but in my opinion, not taking orders when there is an obvious demand is ludicrous - BUT there is a way to do it properly to maximize the "hype". Gaining followers on social media is not as powerful as gaining actual potential buyers. What I would recommend is for you to create a "launch" campaign for the product. You can run all sorts of ads on social media (Fb, Twitter, etc) to bring people into your own landing page where you tell them about the product (and launch date) and capture their contact information. Once you add all these people to your mailing list, you can set up an autoresponder sequence specific to the launch which will send them a few e-mails from now until then "preparing them" for the actual date. If done properly, by the time the launch comes, your customers will be salivating, ready to pull out their credit cards and order the moment the product goes live. This is a great approach because you keep your potential customers interested without overflowing your business with orders you can't fulfill yet. Cheers! P.S. Search for "product launch sequences" so you have a better idea of what I mean.