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By this point in time, if you have been a member of this site for longer than a couple of years, you have witnessed rather complicated processes such as rooting and flashing, turned into easy 1 click procedures. These are normally fool proof and will let you get the most out of your devices while saving you a few hours of reading. However, there is always a risk of bricking your device. This is a time for you to sit down with a good cup of coffee and start reading because unbricking is a fairly complicated procedure that may require special hardware to get it accomplished (JTAG). It looks like this is a thing of the past for Captivate owners because XDA Recognized Developer AdamOutler just released a 1 click unbricking tool. The application is actually part of his Heimdall's project and seems to work very well for various platforms including Linux.
JTAG has been, since the early days of phones, the surefire (and in most cases) the only possible way to bring a device back to life after a flash gone wrong (used to be really common back in the WM days). Nowadays, Android devices are actually rather sturdy in the sense that you can flash virtually anything to these devices and would be easy to revive. This happens to be the case for a lot of Samsung Galaxy phones. However, there are still ways to turn your shinny Galaxy into a shinny paperweight. However, JTAG boxes are usually very expensive and you will likely not be able to make one yourself, or so we thought until we saw this thread made by XDA member AdamOutler. Apparently, the dev is rather familiar with electronics and has taken it upon himself to revive his dead Captivate. In this process, he created a very informative thread in which he includes a design for a circuit, which will enable this functionality. The key thing about this is that because of the proximity of the pin connectors, in order to make this, you had to have very good soldering skills. Thanks to a rather ingenious circuit design, this is no longer the case. The dev has also provided the most recent pin outs for you to try this out yourself.