@wallyllama I experimented a bit with the software that goes with the evaluation board. It looks like the temperature filter should be dynamic as the measured temperature for a single pixel depends on object distance since each pixel has a view angle and the resulting temperature is an average of the covered area which obviously grows with the distance. So in real life you get 24 to 31 Celsius for people in the room if you have the sensor mounted in the middle of the ceiling.
Panasonic has some people tracking demo app and they even provide it's source if you sign their SLA, so it also could be a good starting point. I haven't obtained the source yet though.

Of course it's ugly. The correct way for this is to move the initial readings posting to the setup function:

void sendSensorData()
{
  // Collect, process and send the sensors data here
  send(msgSample.set(42, 1));
}

void presentation()
{
  // Send the sketch version information to the gateway
  sendSketchInfo("Gen", "1.0");
  present(CHILD_ID_SAMPLE, S_LIGHT_LEVEL, "L");
}


void setup()
{
  // Code to initialize the sensors and stuff.
  sendSensorData();
  timer.every(UPDATE_INTERVAL, sendSensorData);
}


void loop()
{
  // Only timer update and possibly OTA checks go into the loop itself. 
  // All the other operations are called by the timer.
  timer.update();
}

HASS support for MySensors seems adequate.
Of course, the sensor will not appear on the dashboard until it sends some data. That seems quite logical, as otherwise there would be nothing to display.
Actuators must report back their real status because receiving a command and successfully executing it can be different things.
Also, the only way to discover a MySensors node existance is receiving data from it, so the actuators should send some initial state in order to be added into HASS or you can manually edit the mysensors.json file to add the missing nodes by hand but it is not well documented.

What are the functions you are missing in HASS that exist elsewhere?

@wallyllama I experimented a bit with the software that goes with the evaluation board. It looks like the temperature filter should be dynamic as the measured temperature for a single pixel depends on object distance since each pixel has a view angle and the resulting temperature is an average of the covered area which obviously grows with the distance. So in real life you get 24 to 31 Celsius for people in the room if you have the sensor mounted in the middle of the ceiling.
Panasonic has some people tracking demo app and they even provide it's source if you sign their SLA, so it also could be a good starting point. I haven't obtained the source yet though.

@wallyllama Just got my amg8832 evaluation board. Do you have any presence detection code to share?