MQTT to IR

Thanks for your reply. The IR part is working. I'm using code from AnalysIR as it's on an esp

If I use for example unsigned char test[] = {0xA6,0xAC,0x00,0x02,0x40,0xA0,0x00,0x20,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x54};

It works fine

However I want the array to be populated from the MQTT payload which comes in as bytes

I need to convert the payload to an unsigned char array it seems