Structures with the ability to sense operating temperatures, pressures, and strains could potentially reduce the weight and costs of composite materials, and result in improved condition based maintenance. Unfortunately, the ingress and egress points of lead wires or fiber optic “tails”, which emanate from the structure, are often subject to fatigue and breakage. Recent advances in wireless systems allow the realization of highly miniaturized sensing, processing, and communications modules. However, powering of wireless sensing systems remains a barrier to their wide application. This paper reports on a network of versatile, embedded wireless sensing nodes that are powered & interrogated by external electromagnetic (EM) fields. The embedded nodes support a wide range of sensors, and include a factory programmable RFID.