I found this circuit made by Aaron Cake. I am using a breadboard. I am so amateur to circuitry that i am having a really tough time putting this together. Can somebody show me a picture of what this is supposed to look like on the bread board?
Don't waste your time. This circuit has its capacitors shown with the wrong polarity. It also puts -12V on to the the bases of the transistors. That exceeds the maximum permitted voltage and will destroy them. Aaron should have removed this circuit from his list years ago.
Look under the 'Power Supplies' section. See the '12/120v'sticky at the top of the list and read all the adverse comments.
I agree that the project has many problems and does not work. Besides, an inverter is a high power circuit and a breadboard is used only for a low power circuit.
Well, thing is that I've built it several times and it has worked for me after mentally reversing the capacitors (which means I really need to fix the schematic). It all depends on the transformer and the exact characteristics of the transistors used. True, the frequency wanders all over the place, loads of heat is wasted. But for a stupid simple circuit (maybe a lot of stupid) it does what it promises...most of the time.
My later inverters had a 4011 oscillator driving two transistors, one inverted, switching each side of the center tap. Worked well and far more frequency stable plus the frequency could be easily adjusted to run higher frequencies. Made a very basic switcher to run computers from 12V.