user: Craft an API request to turn off my living room lights.

assistant: To craft an API request to turn off your living room lights, I would need more information about the specific smart home system and devices you are using. Different smart home systems have their own APIs and protocols for interacting with their devices.

Generally, to turn off the lights using an API request, you would need to send a POST request to the API endpoint for the relevant device or smart home system, with the appropriate authorization credentials and payload data. The payload data would contain information such as the device ID and the desired state (in this case, "off").

Without more specific information, I cannot provide a more detailed answer. Please provide more information about your smart home system and devices or the API you want to use to control them.

user: You could also use MQTT instead of HTTPS-based REST APIs, correct?

assistant: Yes, that's correct. MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a lightweight messaging protocol often used in IoT (Internet of Things) applications, including smart home systems. It operates on a publish-subscribe model, allowing devices to communicate with each other more efficiently than with traditional HTTPS-based REST APIs.

To turn off your living room lights using MQTT, you would need to:

1. Set up an MQTT broker: This could be a cloud-based broker, a self-hosted one, or an embedded broker in your smart home hub or device. The broker is responsible for receiving messages from devices (publishers) and forwarding them to other devices (subscribers).

1. Configure your smart home devices: Ensure that your living room lights and any other devices in the system are set up to communicate using MQTT. This typically involves providing the devices with the MQTT broker's address and appropriate authentication credentials.

1. Publish a message: To turn off the living room lights, you would need to send a message to the appropriate MQTT topic with the desired payload. For example, if your living room lights subscribe to a topic named "home/living-room/lights", you could publish a message to that topic with a payload like {"state": "off"}.

1. Handle the message on the device: The smart home device controlling the living room lights should be configured to receive messages on the specified topic, interpret the payload, and perform the corresponding action (in this case, turning off the lights).

Here's a general example of how to send an MQTT message using a Python MQTT client library, such as paho-mqtt:

```python
import paho.mqtt.client as mqtt

def on_connect(client, userdata, flags, rc):
    print(f"Connected with result code {rc}")

client = mqtt.Client()
client.on_connect = on_connect
client.username_pw_set("username", "password") # Set your MQTT broker credentials
client.connect("mqtt_broker_address", 1883, 60) # Set your MQTT broker address and port

client.loop_start()

topic = "home/living-room/lights"
payload = '{"state": "off"}'
client.publish(topic, payload)

client.loop_stop()
client.disconnect()
```

Keep in mind that this is just a generic example, and the specific implementation will depend on the devices, MQTT broker, and programming language you are using.