user82751: As a complete newbie, after much looking for the best bargain, I ended up buying one of these UNO R3 clones, without realizing it had the chip soldered on the board. It looks like this:

It works OK for development, but after that I want to get rid of the Arduino board and just use the Atmega with the minimum set of components on the final project.
As far as I understand, two tasks need to be acomplished here:

Program the bootloader on the spare Atmega328P
Upload code to the spare Atmega328P

Acording to this tutorial, I should be able to accomplish 1) with my "Arduino" board and a breadboard, but after that I couldn't upload any programs to that same Atme328P as the original microcontroller from the "UNO R3" should be removed and that can't be done on rip off.
Does anybody know of a method to accomplish 2) with my current setup? I also have one of those USB-to-serial converter (FTDI) boards. According to this other tutorial that can be done using it and some components, but I'd like to avoid that if, let's say, there's some trick like disabling the RX and TX line from the soldered chip by software so the external chip ones could be used instead...

user82751: Thanks anyone for the comments. Very clarifying! So, all in all, the replies to my question and other doubts are:

There's no need to remove the existing MCU; it's enough to connect it's RESET pin to ground (GND), so it prevents from messing with the external Atmega, and
There's no need to have a bootloader on the "final" product, as it's only a convenience when developing which allows to upload the program easily.


82751: <p>As a complete newbie, after much looking for the best bargain, I ended up buying one of these UNO R3 clones, without realizing it had the chip soldered on the board. It looks like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/IdzR0.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/IdzR0.jpg" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>
<p>It works OK for development, but after that I want to get rid of the Arduino board and just use the Atmega with the minimum set of components on the final project.</p>
<p>As far as I understand, two tasks need to be acomplished here:</p>
<ol>
<li>Program the bootloader on the spare Atmega328P</li>
<li>Upload code to the spare Atmega328P</li>
</ol>
<p>Acording to <a href="https://docs.arduino.cc/built-in-examples/arduino-isp/ArduinoToBreadboard" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this tutorial</a>, I should be able to accomplish 1) with my &quot;Arduino&quot; board and a breadboard, but after that I couldn't upload any programs to that same Atme328P as the original microcontroller from the &quot;UNO R3&quot; should be removed and that can't be done on rip off.</p>
<p>Does anybody know of a method to accomplish 2) with my current setup? I also have one of those USB-to-serial converter (FTDI) boards. According to <a href="https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Standalone?_gl=1*1bzf759*_ga*MjAxODYzNDY3My4xNjQ0NDQ2MTEy*_ga_NEXN8H46L5*MTY0NDU4MzM3My4zLjEuMTY0NDU4MzU2OS4w" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this other tutorial</a> that can be done using it and some components, but I'd like to avoid that if, let's say, there's some trick like disabling the RX and TX line from the soldered chip by software so the external chip ones could be used instead...</p>
 82751: <p>Thanks anyone for the comments. Very clarifying! So, all in all, the replies to my question and other doubts are:</p>
<ol>
<li>There's no need to remove the existing MCU; it's enough to connect it's RESET pin to ground (GND), so it prevents from messing with the external Atmega, and</li>
<li>There's no need to have a bootloader on the &quot;final&quot; product, as it's only a convenience when developing which allows to upload the program easily.</li>
</ol>
