Shima Control Panel

Some nodes in Shima are best thought of as a remote control. Shima Control Panel is a floating dashboard you can pin widgets onto from any other node - right-click a widget on some random node, choose "Pin to Shima Control Panel," and a mirrored copy appears on the panel. Drag the mirrored slider and the original widget moves with it. Suddenly your denoise, CFG, and seed are all in one place on the canvas instead of scattered across a 60-node graph. If you've ever wanted a mini control room for your workflow, this is it.

How it works

The node's own docstring is refreshingly honest: "Wireless UI Dashboard Node. Runs entirely in Javascript frontend." The backend is mostly ceremonial - it takes a payload string (a hidden JSON widget, default "{}") and parses it, returning the raw string and the parsed dict. All the actual dashboard behavior - the pinning, the mirrored sliders, the live sync - happens in the JavaScript layer, not in the graph logic.

So the flow is: you place a Control Panel on the canvas, right-click widgets elsewhere in the workflow, pin them to it, and the panel becomes the single place you reach for when tuning a generation. The scale widget (0.5–4) just resizes the rendered panel.

The JSON/DICT outputs are worth a moment, though. Because the payload is hidden state, the node can act as a data passthrough: feed it a JSON string and it hands back the same string plus a parsed dictionary. That's handy if you want the panel's stored state readable by other nodes, or if you're using it as a tidy JSON-to-dict bridge while the dashboard does its visual thing.

The inputs that matter

• scale - 0.5 to 4.0, visual size of the panel.
• payload - hidden JSON string. You'll rarely touch it directly; the frontend manages it.

Outputs are JSON (STRING) and DICT - the payload in both forms.

When you'd use it

Realistically, this node shines in the polished, shareable "workflow island" builds the pack is aimed at - the ones where the creator wants the user to adjust exactly three things without diving into the graph. Pin those three widgets, label the panel, and the workflow starts feeling like a product instead of a tangle. For your own daily driver, whether you bother depends on how much you hate hunting for a slider.

Installing it

Part of the Shima pack - ComfyUI Manager → search Shima, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/KDB-USJP/shima_wf.git Shima

Restart ComfyUI. First launch auto-installs the pack's deps and companion repos (ComfyUI-Impact-Pack, cg-use-everywhere).

Common issues

• "Right-click doesn't offer 'Pin to Shima Control Panel'." That's a frontend feature - it needs the pack's JavaScript loaded and a Control Panel present on the canvas. If the pack's JS is disabled or the panel is missing, the menu item won't appear.
• "The panel does nothing with my wires." It's a dashboard, not a processor. The pinning is the feature; the outputs are for reading the payload state, not for routing image data.
• "Pinned values don't sync back." A known fragility of frontend-driven mirrors: if the original node re-renders or the workflow reloads oddly, a pin can desync until you re-pin. Keep it in mind and re-pin rather than fighting it.

The honest verdict: this is a quality-of-life node with real appeal for shared workflows and near-zero appeal for a quick personal graph. When it clicks - a control room for your workflow - it's lovely. When it doesn't, you'll forget it exists.