What are you using on the esp32 base stations? Proxy? Espresence? Beacons can be configured to be ignored after a certain period being idle, that may be part of your problem.
Ya, i hear the cost is very prohibitive for non-US shipping unfortunately.
Not sure if I understand what you’re asking. I’ve just got esphome installed on the ultrasonic sensor and I use espresense to check if the car is not_home.
I now use Tile beacons, one is a Tile, the other is KeySmart with Tile built in. Each has different range of Bluetooth. I don’t want a beacon that goes into deep sleep and takes a long time to wake up. I used one of those HolyIoT beacons and they are so slow, sometimes I drive about 2 kms away from home before it changes to not_home. So if I relied on it to close the garage door I think the thieves would have been and gone!
The use of two different Tile beacons is a good compromise.
Shipping for blue charm beacons cost more than the actual beacon and after converting to Australian dollars I think it was close to $200 each. Well, at least over $100 and I need two which makes it a very very expensive project just to impress the family that the doors automatically closes. 
Right, that was kind of what i was saying earlier. You could get rid of the esp board, HC-SR04 and the batteries to run them and replace it all with an esp32 hidden and out of sight against a wall somewhere because its position is of 0 importance like an HC-SR04 sensor. You could hide it behind a refrigerator and it would sit there and scan for BT beacons 24/7 with no nap breaks or never-ending battery maintenance.
I dont lnow anyone that would want that. I didnt say BC beacons are the cause for that, i said it can be the result of your configuration and you can dismiss and stop reporting idle beacons from the Espresence settings so, you may just have some configuration options that need changed. My beacons dont do that and that isnt the norm from other people who use them.
Unfortunately my experience with other beacon manufacturers is very small. 90% are BC beacons and then a couple Tile beacons so I have no other recommendations for you.
I am curious though. Id bet the need for 2 beacons is a set-up problem and fixable but, why not just use that BT beacon we all carry in our pockets and make phone calls from or a smart watch of you use one of those?
Another simple fix is buying some small esp32’s w/cases and setting them up as BT beacons that plug into a USB port in the cars.
And I am not implying the BC beacons either, since I don’t have any. From my own experimentation and research, BT beacons and BT responses differ quite widely from brand to brand, so that was what I learnt from my very first BT beacon and eventually I found the Tile ones to be suitable to my needs. The HolyIoT ones have the longest battery life but can take a couple of minutes to wake up, hence not suitable for my use. Tile beacons, because they have their own app to try to track you, is very similar to the AirTag scenario so has a much quicker response time, which is why I ended up using them.
My setup is basically this:
I have 2 cars, in two garages, with separate doors. The cars have their own spot, so I can’t just park it in whichever spot that’s free. I also have more than 2 people driving the cars interchangeably, and we each have our own car keys. Also, we don’t want yet another piece of gadget to attach to the already bulky car keys bunches.
Using the devices we already have, I.e. phones and watches, is what I use but smart watches is not ideal because I tend to forget to wear my watch when I go out, so the phones are the surest way (for me) to detect who’s home and who’s not, but not “who’s driving which car”.
The other main issue is also when one comes back. I want to be sure the correct side of the garage door is opened. It’s not as simple as “I drive my car and my wife drives her car”. For double garages with one big door, that’s easy to implement. Mine is just a little bit more tricky.
When someone is detected away, I want to be sure the car is gone as well and not because they just went out to the front lawn to pick up the mail, tend to the garden or something.
So there are lots of scenarios to take into consideration so I setup automation to check if someone is detected not home, then check and see if the garage door is opened and for how long (because someone else might have already driven the car out an hour ago and this person is just going out to put out the garbage) and close if necessary.
The double Tile setup was actually very easy to implement because you just set them up as two different device trackers and then put them into a group in group.yaml. So when both are showing away, the car is very likely away. Added benefit is if one Tile fails I can just temporarily remove it from the group so the system still works. (Likewise I can add new Tiles to the group without changing the automations.)
Unfortunately, even when the tiles are showing having the strongest signal by the garage espresense, it can still flip over to be in the next room (or away) from time to time. And I’ve had one case where I was actually in the garage (with my phone) with a straight line of sight to the Espresense (in the ceiling) but it flipped over to “not_home” for a brief two seconds and triggered the garage door to come down, while another member of the family was driving the car into the garage! And no, I’ve looked at the stats and sometimes, they flip to not_home and can take a minute to switch back so I can’t use the “for x seconds” criteria to control the trigger reliably.
That’s why the idea of the HC-SR04 came into play:
- I want to try out and see how well they work.
- When my automation is triggered, if it detects the car is present then the door won’t come down (that’s why the sensors need to be near the garage door). Likewise, in my ESPresense code, when it flips to “not_home”, if HC-SR04 detects a distance, then I’ll treat the not_home as a false positive.
- It means I now have 3 statuses for my cars: inside the garage, out on the driveway or actually not at home.
It can probably be simpler but because it’s automatically closing the garage doors, I don’t want it to accidentally close it when there are people walking under it, I.e. people not part of the family whose devices are not tracked or a very very old parent who doesn’t carry a mobile phone. Hence the self-imposed very strict criteria to automatically close a garage door.
The electrician is coming in a few days and I won’t have to worry about batteries anymore. In fact, I’ve already returned the battery packs.
I’d thought of that too but as I already have dash cams chewing up batteries (and they shutdown to protect the car battery) I didn’t want to add another one to drain my car battery.
The Tile lasts 3 years and the KeySmart Tile lasts about 2 months but rechargeable.