The paper presents a low cost embedded hardware and software architecture that makes use of COTS components to support distributed real-time embedded systems. The proposed architecture addresses a common problem in conventional architectures: undesirable timing variations in application?s temporal behavior due to overload caused by operating system activities when dealing with concurrent and time-triggered processes. The proposed architecture makes use of a 32bits high performance microcontroller and the open source code operating system for embedded applications uClinux and it enhances these with extensions to better cope with distributed real-time systems development.