Design and Construction of a Microcontroller Based SMS Activated Home Appliance Control System

Electrical appliances are an important and necessary part of everyday existence and are not new. The Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) is a mobile telephone technology that enables people to make and receive phone calls from any location. The GSM also provides additional services like Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and Short Message Service (SMS), which usually allow users to send relatively cheap text messages from one mobile to another. In this work, users control their home appliances remotely using a mobile-phone based interface. In order to access the control unit, the user sends an authentication code with the desired function to the home control system via GSM. Once it is authenticated, the mobile phone-based interface at home (the control unit) relays the commands to the microcontroller circuit that would perform the required function, and a function completion code is returned to the source of the original command (the user's mobile phone).