Engineer Builds Accordions and Autonomous Car System

When Sergey Antonovich rediscovered a childhood ardour for music, he discovered an surprising software 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 an adolescent. Whereas rising up near Moscow, his adolescent passions have been as an alternative channeled into electronics and tinkering with gadgets in after-school lessons. 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 every good tinkerer, he had some concepts about how he may enhance it and he quickly started utilizing his electronics data to construct customized gadgets.

And Antonovich says he’s discovered a stunning concord between his day job and his pastime. Whether or not you’re making certain that an autonomous automobile spots obstacles within the highway in time or translating a musician’s nimble finger work right into a melodious tune, you must quickly course of digital indicators 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 parts, however the ideas are roughly equal.”

Electronics Trumps Music

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

At 8 he was enrolled in a neighborhood 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 taking part in 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 lessons 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 primary 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 choosing 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}. “Whenever you develop software program, there’s a stage of abstraction between you and the factor itself,” he says. “However whenever you work with {hardware}, you perceive how this explicit factor really works.”

Embedding Right into a Profession

Towards the top 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 situations like temperature, humidity, and wind speed to make sure secure workplaces.

It was a distinct segment discipline, however one with strict regulatory necessities, and he needed to shepherd his gadgets by means of 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 techniques, together with ATMs, medical devices, sensors for business 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 automobile 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, but it surely’s not such an inspiring expertise. It’s actually inspiring whenever you see it stay.”

He obtained the job and began work as a software program engineer creating automobile sensor techniques and testing infrastructure. A company restructuring noticed Yandex’s autonomous automobile division spun off as a brand new firm known as Avride. Antonovich labored for the corporate in Israel for a few yr, then in 2024 moved to its new headquarters in Austin.

Antonovich says he works at Arvide totally on the info that feed the automobile’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 choosing 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 knowledge inside tight deadlines.

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

Transferring to the United States has been a optimistic change for Antonovich. On knowledgeable entrance, the nation’s soft-touch regulatory method towards autonomous vehicles has allowed the corporate to make fast 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 parts 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 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 browse sheet music. So, he tried to sort out a few of the issues that beset digital accordions. Commercially out there devices are usually massive and heavy, depend on cumbersome exterior modules so as to add musical accompaniment equivalent to a drum beat, and connect with amplifiers with wires that prohibit the performer’s motion.

“I made a decision that perhaps I can construct a self-contained machine,” 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 in regards to the stage freely.

Surprisingly, Antonovich discovered lots of overlap together with his work on self-driving automobiles—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 essential activity as a developer is to maintain latency as little as doable,” he says. “A top quality system ought to produce sound in lower than 10 milliseconds, and should you come over this threshold it’s very uncomfortable to play.”

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