I'm trying to get this variation on the classic circuit to work. Pardon the awkward VCC label. The voltage is 4.5 volts, though these batteries are only supplying 4 at the moment. I have an LED and a 330 resistor on the output an an indicator.
The goal is to get the third transistor fully saturated to switch on and off as much current as it can safely handle while pushing a minimum of current through the oscillator to minimize its own drain, particularly through where it dumps straight to ground. This way, I could use this as a module to hook up arbitrary loads (within reason) to switch on and off.
No matter how I play around with various resistances and capacitor sizes, but the effect is always the same. The indicator is always just on. A few times, I would see it blink about two times and then go steady. Checking the math on how quickly it should oscillate given the values here, this shouldn't be a case of it going faster than the eye can perceive.
When I look up schematics where people have this circuit tapped for output, they usually take output from the same net as the capacitor's positive terminal. This seems strange to me and makes me worry that the design below is then somehow wrong.
What puzzles me is that just before bread-boarding this one up I did the same circuit, but without the boosting transistor, putting the output of both transistors each through an LED, using 3v supply, and some different resistor and capacitor values, and have something that works beautifully.
How should I go about debugging this and where could I have gone wrong?
