[bartlettD]

He's not using the Arduino Uno for anything useful, its just a test jig to check the cable works. He says at the start of the article that he needs a USB-UART converter to work with another project.

I'm assuming that project doesn't have its own USB-UART like an Uno.

[m-ee]

As the comments above mentioned he could have left the FTDI chip on the arduino board and just used it that way. Moving it to the breakout board didn’t do anything but save some space