LT

Leo
Thakur

leo.py Interactive. Try a command.

Leo is a freshman at Piedmont High School. His favorite language is Python, and he also writes Java and C++. His robotics seasons: FIRST LEGO League 2023 and 2024, FTC Team 11201, and now FRC Team 8033.

Now

Freshman at Piedmont High School in Piedmont, California, on the software subteam of FRC Team 8033.

Four seasons of robot code

Every season, Leo has been on the software side, and every season, the robot got bigger.

  1. 1

    2023–24

    FIRST LEGO League

    Software

    MASTERPIECE season. Leo wrote the code for the team's LEGO robot.

  2. 2

    2024–25

    FIRST LEGO League

    Software

    SUBMERGED season. His second year programming the team's robot.

  3. 3

    2025–26

    FIRST Tech Challenge, Team 11201 Piedmont Pioneers

    Software lead

    DECODE season. Leo led the software team and worked on the robot's shooter and intake. The team won the Design Award.

  4. 4

    2026–27

    FIRST Robotics Competition, Team 8033

    Software subteam

    His first season on Piedmont High's FRC team, programming a full-size competition robot.

FTC 11201

Shooter

Leo worked on the robot's shooter for the DECODE game.

FTC 11201

Intake

Leo worked on the robot's intake for the DECODE game.

Design Award

FTC Team 11201 Piedmont Pioneers, 2025–26

In progress

Teaching a car to drive itself

Leo is building a self-driving RC car on the open-source DonkeyCar platform. There's no hand-written steering logic. A neural network watches the road through a camera and learns to steer by copying how Leo drives.

REC frame 13,150

What the network sees

These are 60 real frames from Leo's training data, recorded in the Donkey simulator at 160×120 pixels. The needle shows the steering he used at each moment.

Picture in, steering out. That pairing, repeated tens of thousands of times, is all the model learns from.

Steering
+1.00
Direction
Hard right
35,059frames in his main simulator dataset
160×120pixels per camera frame
2model types trained: linear and categorical
40%throttle cap for the first real-world tests

Drive laps by hand

Leo drives the simulator track with a PS4 controller. To keep sessions on target, he wrote a lap counter that reads the simulator's telemetry, counts completed laps, tracks the best lap time, and feeds a live on-screen overlay. The goal is 20 clean laps before training.

mycar/lap_counter_part.py

class LapCounter:
    """Tracks completed laps using the sim's last_lap_time telemetry
    and writes live state to a file for the overlay to display."""

    def run(self):
        info = getattr(self.gym_env, 'info', {}) or {}
        lap_time = info.get('last_lap_time', 0.0)
        if lap_time and lap_time != self.last_seen_lap_time:
            self.last_seen_lap_time = lap_time
            self.lap_count += 1
            if self.best_lap_time is None or lap_time < self.best_lap_time:
                self.best_lap_time = lap_time

An AI camera system

A full-stack system that watches live camera feeds, detects people, vehicles, and animals, recognizes familiar faces, and raises alerts. It has a web dashboard and a Flutter phone app. Leo built it with help from an AI coding assistant (Claude Code).

Follow one camera frame through the system. Select a stage to see what it does.

Camera

~3,900lines of Python
~1,800lines of Dart in the Flutter app
19REST API endpoints
9object classes it watches for

config.yaml

detection:
  model: "yolov8n.pt"          # nano = fastest
  confidence_threshold: 0.62
  # 0=person 1=bicycle 2=car 3=motorcycle 5=bus 7=truck 14=bird 15=cat 16=dog
  target_classes: [0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 14, 15, 16]

motion:
  enabled: true
  algorithm: "MOG2"            # skip frames where nothing moves

Toolbox

Languages

  • Pythonfavorite
  • Java
  • C++

AI and vision

Keras, TensorFlow Lite, OpenCV, YOLOv8, face_recognition, Pillow

Apps and back ends

FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, SQLite, Flutter

Robots

FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Tech Challenge, FIRST Robotics Competition, DonkeyCar

Get in touch

For robotics, internships, and summer programs.

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