I have an Arduino Nano clone, a breadboard, and some parts on order. I've never dabbled in building my own circuits, but I'm a fairly good coder, so I thought I would learn about the hardware side ...

The chips on the Arduino Uno cost around $4 USD and can be removed with a IC puller, then you can connect the Arduino’s RX/TX to the IC’s TX/RX, and then connect the reset pins as RST->RST ...