Friesth first got the technology bug as a teenager in the early 1980s. That’s when he began working to adapt items bought at the Radio Shack in town, which resulted in such pursuits as making a programmable robot that could scoot around his boyhood home.

“I had an early entry into electronics back in 1983,” Friesth said.

“I am a serial inventor,” he added. “I have about 117 patents that I have applied for.”

Now, four decades later, Friesth is hot on the quest to use robotics in many of his endeavors, including to capture carbon dioxide, which could provide clean energy jobs in Iowa. Friesth believes his proposal can tap into the recently passed federal Inflation Reduction Act, which includes tax credits for entities that employ carbon dioxide sequestering technologies.

“Some of our technology could save the ethanol plants,” he said.

Other than some stints outside Iowa with other companies here and there, Friesth, 56, has been a lifelong Fort Dodge resident, and it isn’t surprising Friesth ended up where he’s at professionally.

His mother, Doris, in college initially pursued being a chemist (before switching to nursing), and got him many chemistry sets as a child. Father Keith was an electronic and mechanical engineer. A grandfather, Bill Davis, who was one of the owners of several Davis family businesses in the Fort Dodge area, was a key person, too, as Friesth broadened his range of skills by learning metallurgy from his grandpa when undertaking such tasks as making rockets fly.

All these pieces have resulted in the person Friesth is today, an inventor who has created three businesses and is pursuing a fourth, to be named Carbon Renovatio. Coming off a delay that occurred after the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Friesth is working to commercially launch companies and their robotics technologies.

“As the founder, I may be the seed of these plans, but the scope of what our companies are planning to achieve is much greater than any one person could accomplish alone,” he said. “The support from mentors, advisors, friends, family and like minded innovative team members are what brought these businesses with their associated technologies to where they are now, and is what will move them into the future.”

A lot of the processes and technologies that Friesth has created contain mouthfuls of technical terms and also acronyms, such as SMART and HDLS.

He is also excited about pursuing a carbon-capture system that he asserts has great promise in the Hawkeye State. Friesth said Iowans who live near Marshalltown and Cedar Rapids in recent years pushed back on power plants that created carbon dioxide emissions, from which he drew a key lesson.

“That’s when I knew, I had to be carbon-free,” he said.

Carbon capture is a process in which a relatively pure stream of carbon dioxide from industrial sources is separated, then treated and transported to a long-term storage location. In Friesth’s design for how the Carbon Renovatio system would work, the carbon is renewed, converting it to oxygen and algae.

“The company would provide jobs to the area, and we are carbon-neutral, so we are not a polluter,” he said.

Another Friesth endeavor is under way, after he was mentored in the mid-2010s by Texas-based inventor Carl Deckard shortly before he died. Deckard invented an element that ushered in the era of 3D printing, and now Friesth is seeking to update Deckard’s Selective Laser Sintering so that it isn’t just manual, but modernized to be fully automated.

One of the Friesth companies, Haute Fabrication, essentially functions as a virtual 3D printing factory that through robotics eliminates a typical glitch with such printing, since bottlenecks can ensue with the many processes that must line up in the printing workflow. With Friesth’s patented hybrid direct laser sintering (HDLS) process, a device enables Haute Fabrication to detect cracks or other misprints in real time as their system performs visual confirmations at each layer.

With all these varying pieces making headway, Friesth is excited for the possibilities in how 2023 seems to be panning out.

“These projects are incredibly important to me and I believe they will also be to the local and world community at large, with the important benefits that come from them,” Friesth said.