Thanks, Vege. That's WAY more pump and power use than needed for my desired trickle of 20 ml/minute. When doing only air compressing, I have 12V from battery, charging via 40W PV. So realistically 2.5 amps and perhaps 1 amp on a cloudy day, and running off battery when dark. Right now, my run time current draw it tiny, perhaps 40ma total.
I got the Yosoo brand peristalsis pump today.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VHYO9F0/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1The rollers ARE gear driven, it works fine without fussing with the tubing, but it draws 250 ma at 6V. Not terrible but a far cry from the listing of 30ma. They are lugging the motor pretty badly with an inadequate gear ratio. Somewhat disappointing.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VHYO9F0/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1I spent the afternoon updating my Picaxe engine controller software for the new 40x2 part, which is really a PIC 8 bit 18F MCU. It allows software reassignment of all input/output pins so now I've got loads of spares. The new parts are upwardly pin compatible, just some minor software mods needed.
I do appreciate the child- oriented simplicity of the Picaxe as I become more impaired; never any mysterious serial programming problems, dirt cheap, great tech support. I've used the Arduino where I needed interrupts, and time critical real time bit banging and RMS AC voltage calculations for my inverter, but alas, their programmers are error prone and flaky, there were serious bugs in their math library and undocumented features in the compiler relative to interrupt routines setting flags. Basic problems that reminded me why products cobbled together with Open Source software from multiple sources are not my preference when I have serious work to do. I'll also add that for 5V operation, the PIC 18F series uses roughly half the power of the comparable AVR parts, even when adjusting clock for equivalent MIPS.