We were finally back on track and had a things working as intended with the new BCD to seven seg drivers. I had been running these chips as well as the audio playback module off of the 5V from the Arduino Nano regulator. This didn't turn out to be a great decision as it had the Arduino regulator running very hot, too hot for comfort.

I quickly soldered together an LM7805 regulator and ran the 5V components from this instead. The Arduino was no longer running hot, but as you could expect, the regulator was now too hot. The good thing is these TO-220 packages are easy to mount to a case or heatsink.

The bad thing is I didn't have a heatsink or any plan for this. I asked my buddy Jeff (whose place we were building this at) if he had any metal we could mount to the back of this regulator. Eventually he suggested that we could use a beer can. Good old Jeff. I cut up a couple squares from a beer can, threw some thermal paste on it, and screwed the can bits + the regulator into the scoreboard case.

Worked like a charm!

I even added some fins to help with dissipation and of course to make it look cooler.