Going on, these are the things I’ve discovered; I leave them to make anyone easier to collect them, as I had to test a bit.
BLE devices advertise “services”, as opposed to classic BT that advertise device names.
The Bleak library, used by device_le_tracker, only works with BLE, i.e. it “sees” only devices advertising services.
Tech detail: I have tried pairing my cell phone with Home Assistant box, but homessistant.log only shows:
DEBUG (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.bluetooth.manager] hci0 (<redacted>) [connectable]: <phone bt address> AdvertisementData(local_name='Redacted', rssi=-127) match: set()
The tracker never shows anything different from “not_home”.
So, I’m convinced that there’s no way to use bluetooh_le_tracker to track classic devices.
I concede it’s not easy to find an alternative bluetooth python3 library to use with HomeAssistant on all supported platforms. I saw there’s a pybluez2 but it’s not a solution either, as it doesn’t seem to know about dbus.
So, it seems at the moment bluetooth presence means monitor; you need mqtt and fiddling with the OS though. I didn’t try it yet.