I need to find a commercial board to load digital data from protective relays.

[DELV]

I need to learn how to load digital data into a computer.  Is there a board for loading such data that is commercially made?  I presume so.  Can anyone give me some ideas of the what this equipment is called?  Who makes such boards?  What I want to do is put 5 Volts on one trip contact of a relay, and then wait for the protective relay to close the two trip contacts indicating it has tripped and needs to trip a circuit breaker.  At that point, the computer needs to send a trip signal over a network.  I am still wondering how I can find an interface between the relay signal ( a five Volt TTL output) and the computer.  I presume I'll have eight such inputs at each location from eight separate relays, so there will be two, four bit words to read in.  The computer will broadcast both the location and the bit sequence it has read.  That will be looked up remotely based on the location, and the appropriate circuit breaker will be tripped.  Also, I need to output a trip signal.  That signal can be fairly low level, if I feed it through a power transistor.  Again.  I'd like to keep this all commercially available, so who makes the output boards?  It needs to have enough outputs to go to a variety of circuit breakers from the computer.  

[cdiaz95]

Hi DELV:

    From what I understand you basically want to input (the TTL coming from the relays) and output digital signals (to trip the relays). I can think of two ways to do that:

1) Digital I/O devices. https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/category/digital-io.html?productId=118259

You can check there that the amount of channels matches your needs. 

2) C Series Modules. 

https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/category/digital-io.html?productId=118123

However, these require a cDAQ chassis as well. I also found relay output modules, but I have never worked with them and I am not sure if this will work for you. 

[DELV]

Okay, how do I get the IO device to recognize that a particular relay is sending the trip signal?  How do I get the IO device to direct a signal to a particular 86 relay to trip a particular circuit breaker?  How do I produce enough current to operate a relay with a IO device output?  Are power relay boards made that can accept the output from an IO board and amplify the Voltage?  (Say fro 5 V to 120 Vac?)

[IsmaelPinales]

yo tengo el mismo problema

[cdiaz95]

My thought would be that each particular relay is connected to a channel of the IO device, so with NI software (say LabVIEW or DAQExpress) your code/configuration will know which of the channels receives which signal and therefore which relay is sending the signal. The same goes with the output signal, you are able to programmatically generate a signal in a particular channel, which implies in a particular relay.

Regarding your third question usually what I have seen is that the voltage in the output is determined (and the limits are on the specifications for the particular device) and with the impedance of the load (relay in this case) you can know the limits of current you can output. 

And for your fourth question, I honestly do not know that.