XB-BOX - UNet Name Broadcaster

Some nodes do heavy lifting; this one just carries a string. XB_UNetNameBroadcaster is a value node: a dropdown listing every UNet in your models/unet folder, and one output that spits out the chosen filename as text. That's the entire node. It exists to fight the most common plumbing annoyance in ComfyUI - having the same model name typed in four different places and changing it in three of them.

It's the model-loader sibling of the pack's XB_CLIPNameBroadcaster, and it plays a specific role in XB_ToolBox's world: the pack's INT8 ROCm loader ecosystem and pipeline nodes want to know which UNet you loaded, even when the actual loading happens elsewhere in the graph. Broadcasting the name over a wire means one authoritative dropdown, fanned out to everything that needs to know - pick the model once, and every consumer follows.

The one input, the one output

• unet_name - a dropdown populated from your UNet folder (folder_paths.get_filename_list("unet")), so it always reflects what you actually have installed. No free-text typos, no "did I misspell SDXL" - you pick from reality.
• UNet_Name - output, typed * (any). That's the trick that makes it a broadcaster: because it's a wildcard, you can wire the name string into anything that accepts an input - a loader's unet_name socket, a filename builder, a pipeline node, an Any input. ComfyUI won't type-complain.

Why the wildcard matters

The * output is doing real work here. A normal STRING output would only connect to STRING inputs. Broadcasting over * means the same name can drive a loader and a text node and a dynamic bus - without the engine insisting on a specific type. This is straight out of the "any-type node" playbook that every switch and bus node in ComfyUI leans on, and it's exactly what makes a "name broadcaster" feel magical instead of pointless.

The honest take

Do you need it? Only if you're building workflows where one UNet name fans out to several places, or you're deep in the pack's INT8/pipeline ecosystem where the loader is custom and name-awareness matters. For a beginner the value is subtle: it's one less hard-coded string, one less silent mismatch when you swap models. If you've never hit "changed the model in the loader but forgot the filename node," this solves a problem you haven't had yet.

Install: ComfyUI Manager → XB_ToolBox, or git clone https://github.com/wjluoxiao/XB_ToolBox.git into custom_nodes, restart. Under "XB_ToolBox/Wiring". No dependencies, no VRAM, no moving parts - exactly as plumbing should be.