International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / A particular engineering aspect of distributed sensor networks that has not received adequate attention is the system level hardware architecture of the individual nodes of the network. A novel hardware architecture based on an idea of task specific modular computing is proposed to provide for both the high flexibility and low power consumption required for distributed sensing solutions. The power consumption of the architecture is mathematically analyzed against a traditional approach, and guidelines are developed for application scenarios that would benefit from using this new design.