Engineer Builds Accordions and Autonomous Car System

When Sergey Antonovich rediscovered a childhood ardour for music, he discovered an surprising utility for his abilities as an embedded systems engineer: constructing bespoke digital accordions.

Antonovich admits the accordion isn’t the best instrument. It was chosen for him by his mom when he was 8, and he rapidly misplaced curiosity as a teen. Whereas rising up near Moscow, his adolescent passions had been as an alternative channeled into electronics and tinkering with gadgets in after-school courses. This led to a profession engaged on environmental-monitoring gadgets, sensors for business drones, and most just lately, sensor techniques at autonomous-vehicle developer Avride’s R&D hub in Austin, Texas.

However when Antonovich picked his accordion again up as an grownup, he found each latent musical abilities and a newfound appreciation for the instrument. Like several good tinkerer, he had some concepts about how he might enhance it and he quickly started utilizing his electronics information to construct customized gadgets.

And Antonovich says he’s discovered a shocking concord between his day job and his interest. Whether or not you’re making certain that an autonomous car spots obstacles within the highway in time or translating a musician’s nimble finger work right into a melodious tune, you could quickly course of digital alerts from the underlying {hardware}.

“Each techniques, self-driving cars and accordions, are real-time embedded techniques,” says Antonovich. “A self-driving automotive is extra difficult as a result of it incorporates many extra elements, however the rules are kind of equal.”

Electronics Trumps Music

Antonovich grew up in Chekhov, a small city exterior Moscow, and says he had a reasonably abnormal childhood. His father handed away when he was only one, so he was introduced up by his mom, who labored within the printing business, and his grandmother, a faculty principal who taught Russian.

At 8 he was enrolled in an area music college the place he discovered the basics of music idea and the accordion. He was a dutiful pupil, he says, however by no means felt a lot ardour for the instrument his mom picked for him and stopped enjoying when he was about 15.

Sergey Antonovich exhibits off the digital devices he makes in his free time. With one light-weight instrument, he turns into a one-man band. Sergey Antonovich

That was additionally when Antonovich had his first encounter with the world of electronics. He began attending after-school courses the place he was taught to solder and construct easy digital techniques. Antonovich rapidly caught the bug and was quickly knocking collectively digital doorbells, code locks, and fundamental radio receivers in his spare time.

His household inspired him to enroll at a technical secondary college, which taught engineering skills alongside the usual curriculum. When it got here to selecting a college, he determined he wished a grounding in physics, so he enrolled on the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in 2004, selecting a program that taught a mixture of {hardware}, software program, and digital-signal processing.

Antonovich initially deliberate to change into a software program developer however rapidly fell in love with {hardware}. “While you develop software program, there’s a degree of abstraction between you and the factor itself,” he says. “However while you work with {hardware}, you perceive how this explicit factor truly works.”

Embedding Right into a Profession

Towards the tip of his diploma research, in 2009, Antonovich began working for Moscow-based Ecosfera, an organization targeted on environmental and labor-safety measurement gadgets. He continued working for the corporate after graduating in 2010, designing {hardware} and software program to measure circumstances like temperature, humidity, and wind speed to make sure secure workplaces.

It was a distinct segment subject, however one with strict regulatory necessities, and he needed to shepherd his gadgets by rigorous certification procedures, the primary main accomplishment of his profession. From there, he labored for quite a lot of corporations on totally different embedded and Internet of Things techniques, together with ATMs, medical devices, sensors for business drones, and digital value tags. Then in 2021 he interviewed at internet firm Yandex, which operates Russia’s hottest search engine, to work on its autonomous car program.

“I bear in mind I used to be approaching the workplace entrance and I noticed a automotive which was driving itself,” Antonovich says. “You see it on YouTube, nevertheless it’s not such an inspiring expertise. It’s actually inspiring while you see it dwell.”

He received the job and began work as a software program engineer growing car sensor techniques and testing infrastructure. A company restructuring noticed Yandex’s autonomous car division spun off as a brand new firm known as Avride. Antonovich labored for the corporate in Israel for a couple of 12 months, then in 2024 moved to its new headquarters in Austin.

Antonovich says he works at Arvide totally on the info that feed the car’s notion algorithms, which incorporates radar and lidar. Each sorts of sensors have strengths and weaknesses—radar has lengthy vary however low decision, whereas lidar is nice at selecting out shapes however solely as much as a sure distance—so the algorithmic notion system combines the info. Antonovich’s job is to construct the diagnostic techniques that guarantee these sensors are working in good synchrony and ship information inside tight deadlines.

In his day job, Antonovich works on the sensor techniques for self-driving vehicles. Sergey Antonovich

Shifting to the United States has been a constructive change for Antonovich. On knowledgeable entrance, the nation’s soft-touch regulatory strategy towards autonomous vehicles has allowed the corporate to make speedy progress on its expertise. However he says the transfer has additionally helped him indulge his tinkering instincts in his spare time.

“As a maker, I’d say [the United States] is a paradise,” he says. “Digital elements are very accessible. You simply organize them and so they arrive in a short time and every little thing simply works.” Antonovich has taken full benefit of this to dive into his different ardour—constructing musical devices.

A Musical Repris

In 2017, when he was nonetheless residing in Russia, Antonovich seen a brand new technology of digital accordions rising and it sparked his curiosity. “I believed, why not attempt to modify my very own [acoustic] accordion?” he says.

He dusted off his instrument and was gratified to seek out that he might nonetheless play and skim sheet music. So, he tried to sort out a number of the issues that beset digital accordions. Commercially accessible devices are usually giant and heavy, depend on cumbersome exterior modules so as to add musical accompaniment comparable to a drum beat, and connect with amplifiers with wires that prohibit the performer’s motion.

“I made a decision that possibly I can construct a self-contained gadget,” he says. Beginning with an acoustic accordion as a base, he added a synthesizer, put in inside microphones to seize acoustic sounds that would then be blended with digital ones, and built-in wi-fi transmitters that would free performers from cables and allow them to transfer concerning the stage freely.

Surprisingly, Antonovich discovered lots of overlap together with his work on self-driving vehicles—specifically, the necessity to handle latency alongside the signal-processing chain. To offer a seamless expertise to the participant, a digital accordion must quickly route enter from dozens of buttons and keys on two separate keyboards to the synthesizer, which has its personal processing delay.

“Your major activity as a developer is to maintain latency as little as attainable,” he says. “A top quality system ought to produce sound in lower than 10 milliseconds, and in case you come over this threshold it’s very uncomfortable to play.”

Antonovich now has a rising menagerie of each hybrid acoustic-digital and absolutely digital accordions. However whereas he’s constructed accordions for associates, he’s in no hurry to show his interest right into a enterprise. “Making them a business product will flip my curiosity to necessity,” he says. “While you do one thing for a residing, you do it as a result of it’s a must to and never since you select to.”