Smart Bus Out 5

Smart Bus Out 5 is the five-slot counterpart of Smart Bus Out. Feed it a SMART_BUS and it unpacks the first five stored values into five any outputs, with the bus itself passed through for continued travel down the chain.

If you're using the 5-slot Smart Bus In on the front end, this is the natural match on the back end. Five slots covers the everyday set - seed, width, height, CFG, a prompt - and the node takes up noticeably less canvas than its ten-output sibling. For workflows where "bundle a handful of values, unpack them where they're used" is the whole job, this keeps the graph readable without the sprawl.

How it works

Same mechanism as the ten-slot version, just smaller. The bus dict carries a values array and a labels array; this node normalizes the incoming bus to five slots and exposes any 1 through any 5. The first five values come out, in order, and the bus itself is returned unchanged so you can keep chaining - Out → In → Out, or fan one bus into several Out 5s to serve different regions of the graph.

The any type on the outputs is both the feature and the caveat. It'll plug into nearly any input - KSampler CFG, an int widget, a path - which is exactly the flexibility you want from a bundle-and-distribute node. It also means type mismatches surface at queue time instead of connect time: if slot 2 holds a string and you wire it into a float input, that's your problem to catch.

The inputs and outputs

• bus - required SMART_BUS input.
• Outputs: bus (passthrough) plus any 1 … any 5.

Unfilled slots come out as None, so wire from the slots you actually populated. And label your slots at the In node - the labels ride along in the bus and show up on the Out side, which is the difference between "any 3" and "width."

Installing it

It ships in SmartHelperNodes; install the pack once and you get the whole bus family:

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

Restart ComfyUI, or install via ComfyUI Manager ("SmartHelperNodes"). No dependencies, no model downloads.

When 5 beats 10

Honest answer: whenever the ten-slot version makes your workflow look like a control panel. A five-slot bus is plenty for the common "override these few settings per run" case, and the smaller footprint keeps you from dragging a tall node around the canvas. If you genuinely need more than five values in one bundle, chain two Out 5s or use the ten-slot pair - both speak the same SMART_BUS protocol, so mixing them is free.