Hardware Product Canvas
= a tool designed to help you get through the earliest stages of a hardware design. It's open-source, creative commons, and totally hackable.
URL = http://hardwareproductcanvas.com/
Description
"All hardware is made up of building blocks. Engineers call these blocks electrical-mechanical components, or simply parts. Almost every part in existence is either a sensor, a communicator, a storage device, a user interface, or a processor. And almost every hardware device is made up of just a handful of blocks. For example, a fitbit is just a motion sensor, flash memory storage, and a microcontroller processor).
To use the canvas you just need to fill in the blanks. What kind of forces does your product need to sense? What kind of communication do you need? Do you need to store anything on the device? How much data do you need to process, and what kind of processor do you need? Do you need a user interface? LEDs or LCD or something else?"