Aligarh: Two B. Tech. (final year) students, Abdullah Azhar Ali and Kamal Kumar Gupta of department of Electronics, Z. H. College of Engineering and Technology, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) have brought laurels to the university by developing a technology to control the home appliances through Short Messaging Service (SMS) using GSM mobiles.

The technology was developed as a part of their final year project under the supervision of Prof. Ekram Khan of Department of Electronics.

"It has been observed often that people leave the switch of electrical and electronics appliances on when they go out for a short or long periods but nothing can be done even if they realize their mistakes. But do not worry, now you can put such electrical and electronics appliances off simply by sending an SMS to a GSM unit at home," said an official press release.

The project has received second prize at a national level students' competition "Engineer Infinite" held at Mumbai as part of International Exhibition of Electrical and Industrial Electronics, "Elecrama-2010".

Delegates hailing from over 40 countries attended the exhibition.

The competition received over 428 entries from 198 institutions from 22 states of India including entries from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs).

After a four-day demonstration by the students before the delegates and judges the prizes were declared.

The project demonstrated by Abdullah Azhar Ali and Kamal Kumar Gupta was declared second best and it received prize money of Rs.1 lakh.

There are a number of technologies used for home automation through the use of internet, wi-fi, bluetooth and infrared technologies but they are restricted in nature on merit of scope of control, reliability, security and cost.

But the present GSM based automation system has no such limitations as it allows the user to control any device at his home from anywhere in the world and that too on a considerably low cost.