Basic example, if I bought a chipset with a light socket and bulb soldered to the chipset; then put a USB cable with the mini-USB plug on the end to get plugged into the android phone. Can I write a Java application to turn on/off the light, get the status of the light(on/off) and maybe power a super-small led/bulb with power from the phone itself?
Any insight at all would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
If you need to do it in Java, I guess the answer is no. The SDK doesn't have that kind of low level functionalities.
In my short experience with Android, the only hack I did was connecting a Bluetooth keyboard and it was on a rooted phone running scripts in a console.
You can always hack the code, build your own android and provide that functionalities to an Android app, but I don't know if you want to go down that road.