I think that waving the decon planner over the request slots cancels whatever is currently happening (or prgresses to the repair stage when appropriate).

Also, how am I supposed to do the maintnance before bots?

Yeah, the deconstruction planner ignores the "not-deconstrucible" flag of the request signals, because the Factorio engine don't expect it there. I hope that the devs will add this sometime. Unfortumately, at the moment there is not much i can do about it.

For early game machine servicing there is a special "maintenance unit", that is unlocked after researching "Maintenance and repair". Just place one of these units beside your machines and fill it with some maintenance/repair items. It will then do the work for you.

I've tried it, and it didn't do anything for me. Plus, half of the stuff is locked in the beginning.

The maintenance materials need to be researched first, that's true. It's intentional that your maintenance abilities are limited in the early game stage. But don't worry, even with only the first item (the mechanical spare parts) you'll be able to reduce the wear of your machines significantly. After getting into the mid game stage, all materials are available and also construction bots, which make maintenance a lot easier.

I'm sorry to hear that the maintenance unit doesn't work for you as expected. The unit acts periodically. To be precise: it checks every MTTM*0.5, if the adjacent machines need something. MTTM is the average time the yellow maintenance sign is visible, as specified in the mod settings. This is by default 3 min, so the unit checks on average every 1.5 min if adjacent machines need maintenance. If the unit has some of the required items inside, it will transfer them to the machines. If you think this should be changed somehow, i'm always open for suggestions to improve this mod :)

Edit: Fixed some typos

so I need to make enough units to place near every single machine? I think I'll just eat the maintnance costs for now.

Do personal bots\nanobots work with this? I know that construction drones don't (but that makes sense, since they do everything with script)

so I need to make enough units to place near every single machine? I think I'll just eat the maintnance costs for now.

Do personal bots\nanobots work with this? I know that construction drones don't (but that makes sense, since they do everything with script)

i have several other mods which seem to make it "extra hard" to get to the stage of automatically doing repairs, but i still hope that I'll soon get the necessary item (of another mod) to start researching robotics, and thus i still live with those "maintenance machines" after 35+ hours into my map ...
edit: after 36 hours, i got that item, researched robotics, and now can really enjoy all the automatic repairs !!! :-)

as far as i have seen (and the background indicator shows) this maintenance unit only has a range of 3x3 tiles, thus must be placed directly adjacent to the machine that needs maintenance. i can fill it with lots of repair items and thus need to refill it only less often, but it still is quite some burden to have so many maintenance units: i currently have 50+ of them for a small factory of only maybe 100+ machines. each of them is made from 57 iron plates, 11 copper plates, and 2 bricks (since my green circuits are made with stone tablets or with wood for insulation) which adds up a lot. they also use 1.5 of 3.5 MW, thus almost half of the power i generate :-( "38kW each" is not much, but when it adds up and i can't really use solar or big electric machine setups yet because of the amount of additional maintenance they would require (more maintennace units and thus even more power consumption), it is a burden.

would you consider to maybe extend their range, eg to 5x5 so that 1 maintenance chest can repair 3 instead of 2 machines that are in a row next to each other, or both machines in a setup of machine-inserter-chest-inserter-machine? currently it often is quite hard to find a location next to a machine in a tight spaghetti setup :-) :-(

@Mernom:
personal bots are construction bots and not logistic bots that can transport the repair items from provider chests to the invisible requester chests, and thus they probably won't help. nanobots work differently, thus don't work either.
edit: i have bots now, and thus could see that the maintenance is done by construction bots and thus personal bots should be usable for that task.

edit: at first i thought that an invisible requester chest is put on top of the machine that needs repair and their request filter is set to what the machine needs for the repair. if that would have been true, logistic bots instead of construction bots would have done the maintenance and personal bots would have been unusable. i probably was also additionally confused a bit by some other mod that also introduced some repairs and that other mod puts requester chest for "repair items" next to those machines that are about to blow up.

AFAIK this mod uses the module request slot logic, so it should function via construction bots.

A different issue: the Beltbox entities from https://mods.factorio.com/mod/deadlock-beltboxes-loaders have oversized icons for their scrap variaty.

Hi Mernom, after a forced break, i'll soon continue to work on this mod. Thank you for your issue report with the beltbox entities. I'll check that.

Both issues have been fixed in the latest update, thank you again for reportin them!

Good. I may start a game again with this mod: this time without the madness that is Nauvis day!

Nauvis day? What does this mod do?

makes pollution and evolution MUCH worse. Burner miners produce like 300 pollution\sec.
Add to that me having Bob's enemies... Yeah, I was at ~90% evo before even green science.
And even that only because it doesn't modify modded burner entites, which allowed me to exploit AAI burner generators for power.