🕰️ 辉光管计时器

Every so often a custom node shows up whose whole job is to look good and tell the truth. NixieTimer is that node. Drop it on the canvas and you get a glowing Nixie-tube style world clock - you know, the orange vacuum-tube digits from old Soviet and HP instruments - with a second row that times how long a generation run takes. No API, no model files, no wires out. It's the kind of thing you'd reach for when you stream or record your workflow and want the graph itself to look alive, or when you're tired of alt-tabbing to check the wall clock mid-batch.

What it actually is

The Python side of this pack is almost aggressively simple. The NixieTimer class declares RETURN_TYPES = () and its noop function returns nothing - the node performs zero computation. All the real work lives in a frontend extension (js/nixie_timer.js), which draws the panel as a DOM widget inside the node. That's why it behaves like a normal node: it moves and scales with the canvas, and dragging the node's border scales the whole panel proportionally. The retro glow is pure CSS - gradients, text-shadow, blinking colons, electrode details - so there are no images or fonts to download. This is a pure UI element in the purest sense, the rare case where the node is the widget.

How the timer works

The clever bit is how it measures time: it hooks ComfyUI's own queue instead of guessing. Clicking Queue or Queue Front fires the extension's startTimer() (it wraps app.queuePrompt), and the count stops when the backend reports queue_remaining === 0 - or immediately on an execution error. Elapsed time comes from performance.now() in your browser, so it's wall-clock, and the result stays on screen after the run finishes until you queue again.

Two honest caveats from reading the source. First, the hook is global: clicking Queue on any workflow starts the timer, and it keeps counting until the entire queue drains. Queue a 20-image batch and you get the whole batch's time, not per-image. Second, all NixieTimer instances share one global timer, so a second copy of the node on the canvas shows the same value - "timers stay in sync," as the README puts it. Handy if you want a clock visible at both ends of a big graph.

The one input (and the zero outputs)

There's exactly one input, tube_color, an enum with seven choices: red, green, blue, amber, purple, cyan, white. It's purely cosmetic - it swaps the CSS color theme. One heads-up: the dropdown labels are in Chinese even in an English UI, because they come straight from the author's color list (红色 is red, 绿色 is green, and so on). Default is red, and honestly the orange glow is the look that says "Nixie tube," so you're fine leaving it.

Outputs: none. RETURN_TYPES is empty, so there's nothing to wire into anything. It doesn't participate in the graph's data flow - it's a decoration plus a stopwatch.

Installing it

This one is blessedly dependency-free: pyproject.toml lists no dependencies, there's no requirements.txt, no models, no downloads. The README's blessed path is:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/wul7chaos/Comfyui-nixie-timer.git

Then restart ComfyUI and hard-refresh the browser (Ctrl+Shift+R). The extension registers server-side on startup, so a plain refresh often won't pick it up - that's the classic gotcha with any JS-heavy custom node, and it's worth remembering because the node will appear missing when it's really just a stale browser cache. (The pack is registered on the Comfy registry, so ComfyUI Manager can handle it too - search "ComfyUI Nixie Timer".) After that, double-click the canvas and search NixieTimer or 辉光管 under category utils.

The one thing to know

It's a brand-new pack with basically zero community footprint yet - no forum threads, no battle-tested tips, nothing to warn you about. That's fine: it's a small, clean, MIT-licensed 276-line extension with nothing that can bite you. Just remember it measures wall-clock time for the whole queue, and don't trust its color dropdown to be in English.