Pipe In 8CH

Pipe In 8CH is the "merge" half of a simple 8-slot data bus. You wire up to eight arbitrary things into it - an image, an int, a string, a mask, whatever - and it folds them into one pipe output that travels down a single wire. The matching Pipe Out 8CH splits the bus back out on the other side of your group. That's the whole trick: eight connections become one, which keeps a busy subgraph from looking like a plate of spaghetti.

The name is honest, mostly. It's "8CH" because there are eight any_1 through any_8 slots, each typed * so it accepts anything ComfyUI can pass. The only wrinkle is the one extra input, pipe: if you chain two Pipe In 8CH nodes, the second one starts from the first node's bus, so its unconnected slots keep the values already riding along. Connect a slot and it overwrites that position; leave it empty and the previous value survives. That "keep what was already there" behavior is the same merge logic every RvTools pipe node uses, and it's genuinely handy for managed groups where you want to inject one new value into a bus without re-wiring everything.

Install. Easiest via ComfyUI Manager: search "RvTools" and install ComfyUI-RvTools_v2, let Manager pull the dependencies, restart. Or by hand:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/r-vage/ComfyUI-RvTools_v2
# restart ComfyUI afterwards

No model files, no API keys - it's pure plumbing. The pack's requirements.txt does pull in some chunky packages (opencv-python, pynvml, piexif, Pillow, pilgram), so if you clone manually, pip install -r requirements.txt into your ComfyUI venv before restarting.

The catches. Two, and one is structural. First, pipe buses are positional: the order of your eight slots is the contract. Pipe In 8CH writes (any_1..any_8), Pipe Out 8CH reads (any_1..any_8) - if you swap two wires on the In side, everything downstream silently shifts. Second, this node is flagged DEPRECATED in the source, along with most of the pack's generic pipe nodes, and the pack README itself says RvTools v2 has been superseded by ComfyUI_Eclipse, which inherits most of these nodes. Deprecated here mostly means "there's a newer home," and plenty of existing workflows still load it fine - but if you're starting fresh, Eclipse is the forward path. Also be aware that a lot of shared workflows reference the older RvTools v1 repo, which was deleted from GitHub; those fail to install from Manager and need migrating to the v2 node names (the [RvTools] suffix is the giveaway you've got the right one).

Where people get burned: they expect Pipe In 8CH to do something with its values. It doesn't - it just carries them. The actual consuming happens on the Out side, so if you drag this in alone nothing visibly changes until a Pipe Out 8CH (or a matching bus consumer) unpacks it.