In the past few years, the idea of extending the Grid to cover also the remote access, control, management of instrument devices has been explored in a few initiatives. Existing tools lack in generality and require advanced specialized computer science knowledge, thus making them difficult to be broadly adopted in the scientific community. In this paper we present a new open source initiative that is designed to overcome these problems. The Tiny Instrument Element project defines a high level architecture for plugging instruments into the Grid and provides the corresponding skeleton implementation. This lightweight approach, as opposed to existing middleware-based solutions, reduces the effort required to Gridify existing instruments. The paper evaluates the proposed abstraction with a case study from a pervasive computing scenario.