Engineer Builds Accordions and Autonomous Car System

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

Antonovich admits the accordion isn’t the good instrument. It was chosen for him by his mom when he was 8, and he rapidly misplaced curiosity as a young person. Whereas rising up near Moscow, his adolescent passions have been as an alternative channeled into electronics and tinkering with gadgets in after-school courses. This led to a profession engaged on environmental-monitoring units, sensors for industrial drones, and most just lately, sensor programs 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 expertise and a newfound appreciation for the instrument. Like all good tinkerer, he had some concepts about how he may enhance it and he quickly started utilizing his electronics data to construct customized units.

And Antonovich says he’s discovered a stunning concord between his day job and his passion. Whether or not you’re guaranteeing that an autonomous car spots obstacles within the street in time or translating a musician’s nimble finger work right into a melodious tune, you want to quickly course of digital indicators from the underlying {hardware}.

“Each programs, self-driving cars and accordions, are real-time embedded programs,” says Antonovich. “A self-driving automotive is extra sophisticated 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 fairly odd childhood. His father handed away when he was just 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 faculty the place he realized the basics of music idea and the accordion. He was a dutiful scholar, 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 programs. 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 faculty, which taught engineering skills alongside the usual curriculum. When it got here to selecting a college, he determined he needed a grounding in physics, so he enrolled on the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in 2004, selecting a program that taught a mix of {hardware}, software program, and digital-signal processing.

Antonovich initially deliberate to develop into a software program developer however rapidly fell in love with {hardware}. “If you develop software program, there’s a degree of abstraction between you and the factor itself,” he says. “However once you work with {hardware}, you perceive how this specific 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 centered on environmental and labor-safety measurement units. He continued working for the corporate after graduating in 2010, designing {hardware} and software program to measure situations like temperature, humidity, and wind speed to make sure secure workplaces.

It was a distinct segment area, however one with strict regulatory necessities, and he needed to shepherd his units via rigorous certification procedures, the primary main accomplishment of his profession. From there, he labored for a wide range of corporations on totally different embedded and Internet of Things programs, together with ATMs, medical devices, sensors for industrial drones, and digital worth 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 keep 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, but it surely’s not such an inspiring expertise. It’s actually inspiring once you see it reside.”

He acquired the job and began work as a software program engineer growing car sensor programs 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 yr, 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 programs that guarantee these sensors are working in excellent synchrony and ship knowledge inside tight deadlines.

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

Shifting to the United States has been a constructive change for Antonovich. On an expert entrance, the nation’s soft-touch regulatory method 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 might say [the United States] is a paradise,” he says. “Digital elements are very accessible. You simply get them organized and so they arrive in a short time and every 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 observed a brand new technology of digital accordions rising and it sparked his curiosity. “I assumed, why not attempt to modify my very own [acoustic] accordion?” he says.

He dusted off his instrument and was gratified to search out that he may nonetheless play and skim sheet music. So, he tried to sort out a number of the issues that beset digital accordions. Commercially obtainable devices are sometimes massive and heavy, depend on cumbersome exterior modules so as to add musical accompaniment resembling a drum beat, and hook up with amplifiers with wires that limit 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 might then be blended with digital ones, and built-in wi-fi transmitters that might free performers from cables and allow them to transfer in regards to the stage freely.

Surprisingly, Antonovich discovered loads of overlap together with his work on self-driving vehicles—particularly, 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 principal job 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 the event 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 passion right into a enterprise. “Making them a industrial product will flip my curiosity to necessity,” he says. “If 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.”