Xiaomi turns the humble power strip into a 33 w touchscreen command centre
Xiaomi just dragged the most boring object in your house into the smart-home era and slapped a €35 price tag on it. The Track Socket Set T1 is a modular rail that lets you slide, twist and program each outlet like Lego, then boss it around from your phone or the 3,2-inch colour display bolted to the rail itself.
Slide, snap, automate
Start with a 50 cm aluminium track, pop in up to five blocks—plain Schuko, USB-C at 33 W, whatever—and tighten by hand. No screws, no voided warranty, no electrician. Each block handles 2 500 W, the whole rail 8 000 W, so a gaming rig, microwave and 3-D printer can coexist without the smell of melted plastic. A hall-effect sensor detects footfall: walk into the room and the rail wakes up the desk lamps, monitor and scent diffuser before your backside hits the chair. Leave, and it kills the energy vampires after a user-defined lag. The trick is dirt-cheap: the sensor is the same PIR Xiaomi already ships in €9 night-lights, recycled here with a firmware tweak.
control lives in the Xiaomi Home app, but the 320 × 240 touchscreen is the star. Swipe left for real-time draw in watts, right for euro-cent cost since midnight, down for weather. Long-press an outlet icon and you can drag it into an automation—say, cut power to the TV and soundbar when the camera detects everyone has left the living room. Child-lock? A two-finger pinch disables the capacitive buttons; the motorised rotary switches still work, but only after a 3-second press-and-hold.
Why this matters beyond the geek bench
Europeans buy 50 million power strips a year, most of them dumb, many overdosed until the plastic browns. By embedding metering and presence logic in the socket itself, Xiaomi turns every desk, kitchen counter or workshop bench into a node that feeds granular data back to the same cloud already babysitting your robo-vacuum and air-purifier. Utilities in Spain and Italy are piloting time-of-use tariffs that swing from 8 c€ to 45 c€ per kWh within a single afternoon; a €35 rail that can shave standby load and shift dishwasher pre-heat to the cheap slot pays for itself before the Christmas lights go up.
The subtext is supply-chain muscle. Xiaomi is leveraging the same 5 V relay modules it mass-produces for smart wall switches, the same BL0940 power-measurement IC already qualified in 12 million smart plugs. Margins stay fat while the BOM nosedives, undercutting Aqara, Meross and the rest of the “smart strip” crowd that still charge €80 for three Wi-Fi outlets and call it innovation.
Expect three SKUs at launch: 50 cm/3 sockets at €34,99, 60 cm/3 sockets at €54,99, 80 cm/4 sockets at €59,99. Sales open 14 June on Xiaomi’s European e-store, with Amazon.de and MediaMarkt following a week later. Early grey-market imports are already flipping for €49 on Wallapop—proof that even scalpers recognise the cheapest way into a whole-home energy dashboard just got cheaper than a round of drinks.