Smart Bus In 5

Smart Bus In 5 is the small-format member of the bus family in SmartHelperNodes. It does exactly what Smart Bus In does - merge values into a SMART_BUS, replacing only the slots you've wired and passing the rest through untouched - but it carries five parameters instead of ten.

That's the whole difference, and it's a real one if you've ever looked at a ten-slot bus and wished it wasn't so tall. Most of the time you're ferrying a handful of things: a seed, a width, a CFG, maybe a prompt. Five slots covers that with half the visual footprint.

How it works

Same mechanism as its big sibling. A bus is a dict of values and labels; the node reads the workflow JSON to tell which param_1 through param_5 slots are actually wired. Wired slots overwrite the incoming bus values; unwired slots keep whatever the bus already held. So you can slot one value into the middle of a five-slot bus and the other four ride along from the previous link in the chain.

Because it uses the same SMART_BUS type, the 5-slot and 10-slot nodes interoperate - a 10-slot Smart Bus In feeding a Smart Bus Out 5 will simply present the first five values, and a 5-slot In can hand off into the 10-slot world. Think of them as the same bus with different port counts, like USB-A and USB-C on the same cable.

The inputs

• bus - the incoming bus to merge into (optional).
• param_1 through param_5 - any-type inputs; wire the ones you want to change.

Output is a single bus (SMART_BUS). To get values back out of a bus you pair it with a Smart Bus Out 5, or run In → In → Out to accumulate edits along a chain.

Installing it

Part of SmartHelperNodes, installed with the rest of the pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/slvslvslv/ComfyUI-SmartHelperNodes

Restart ComfyUI, or use ComfyUI Manager and search "SmartHelperNodes". No dependencies, no model downloads.

When to pick 5 over 10

If your bus is mostly carrying pass-through state with an occasional override, 5 slots is the tidier tool. If you're consolidating a whole KSampler's worth of settings, the 10-slot version (or chaining two 5-slot Ins) is the better fit. The only real gotcha is shared with every bus node in this pack: the wired-vs-unwired trick needs the workflow data at execution time, so if you're scripting the API, make sure you're sending the full workflow JSON rather than a bare prompt dict.