Goblins work well for the small techno-race. You could mix them up visually by giving them two pairs of eyes, and have one set of eyes have darkvision, and the other dayvision, so that they are always walking around with one pair of eyes closed and one pair of eyes open. They might even have a dual-brain thing going on, so that their 'night-self' is sleeping when their darkvision eyes are closed, and their 'day-self' goes to sleep during the evening, so that they don't actually sleep (and have radically different personalities, depending on 'who'se driving'). They have various dark colored skin tones, in green, blue, red, purple, etc. and usually have blotches, spots or streaks of some brightly-clashing lighter color like yellow, lighter green, etc. on their large bald heads, trailing down their backs, chests and upper arms.
Whatever name they have for their species is either not pronounceable by humans, or varies depending on who you ask, as each 'Grem' thinks of his racial name as being the same as his Clan name, and they have dozens of Clans. So they are called 'Grems,' short for Gremlins. They communicate among each other through unclear means, which involves a ton of super-fast eye-blinking (almost like morse code, with dozens of blinks happening in a second, and both eyes in use blinking independently), hand-gestures with the left hand only (it's considered rude and insulting to 'speak' to someone with your right hand, with even a crippled one-handed Grem using a prosthetic rather than 'talking' to a fellow Grem with his right hand) and occasional changes in coloration (emphasis and emotion, mostly). To other races, they communicate verbally in squeaky voices, or, when annoyed, make rapid-fire gestures with their right hands (a fighting offense between two Grems, but they think nothing of addressing a human that way, knowing that maybe one Human in a hundred knows that it's being insulted, and maybe one in a thousand can 'read' Grem hand-language).
Their ability to rapidly process visual information, as indicated by their eye-blink language and ability to read information from two blinking eyes and a gesturing hand simultaneously, helps significantly when they work with mathematical processes or analytical engines or whatever sort of computers or thinking machines exist in the setting. Not only can they process multiple sources of visual information, they can do so with a single eye, and turn the other indendently to look at something else, leading to the sight of two Grems standing side by side, with a single eye facing the other, blinking furiously, while their far eye looks at the project they are working on. (Grems can communicate with one eye, and even skip the hand gestures, but it dramatically slows down their rate of 'speech.' For any involved discussion, both eyes and the left hand are preferred, or even required, as eye-blinks don't allow for modifiers, such as adverbs or adjectives, only nouns and verbs. You can say 'tool' in eyeblink, but need a hand to say 'red tool.') Amongst themselves, they only use audible speech, in some other language (as they have no spoken language of their own), when the situation demands (both hands full, need to face away from each other, etc.).
Grem have been found in small communities scattered around the setting, but claim to have no idea where they 'came from,' only that it wasn't from around here.
. I am going for more fantasy/sword ad sorcery with science fiction clothing, a more different take than what Dragostar did.
