A chopper transistor is whats inside every switching power supply, probably not beyond your capabilities, only if you start to mess with such things buy a dozen more than you need, I allways end up with a bag of blowns.
A chopper is just a switch that has dc on one side and a squarewave on the other that is an amplified version of the squarewave on the base/gate.
The front end of a switching psu is something along the lines of what I meant, only you'd need something isolated from the mains of course.