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 shortly misplaced curiosity as a teen. Whereas rising up near Moscow, his adolescent passions have been as a substitute 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 not too long ago, 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 expertise and a newfound appreciation for the instrument. Like every good tinkerer, he had some concepts about how he might enhance it and he quickly started utilizing his electronics information to construct customized units.

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 automobile spots obstacles within the street in time or translating a musician’s nimble finger work right into a melodious tune, it is advisable to 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 automobile is extra difficult as a result of it incorporates many extra elements, however the ideas are roughly equal.”

Electronics Trumps Music

Antonovich grew up in Chekhov, a small city outdoors Moscow, and says he had a reasonably atypical 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 faculty principal who taught Russian.

At 8 he was enrolled in an area music college the place he discovered the basics of music concept 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 courses the place he was taught to solder and construct easy digital techniques. Antonovich shortly 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 develop into a software program developer however shortly 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 while you work with {hardware}, you perceive how this specific factor really 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 units. 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 protected workplaces.

It was a distinct segment discipline, 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 firms on completely different embedded and Internet of Things techniques, 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 automobile program.

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

He acquired the job and began work as a software program engineer growing automobile sensor techniques and testing infrastructure. A company restructuring noticed Yandex’s autonomous automobile division spun off as a brand new firm referred to 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 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 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 knowledge inside tight cut-off dates.

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

Shifting to the United States has been a constructive change for Antonovich. On an expert entrance, the nation’s soft-touch regulatory strategy 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 might say [the United States] is a paradise,” he says. “Digital elements are very accessible. You simply get them organized they usually 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 dwelling 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 seek out that he might nonetheless play and browse sheet music. So, he tried to sort out a few of the issues that beset digital accordions. Commercially accessible devices are sometimes massive and heavy, depend on cumbersome exterior modules so as to add musical accompaniment corresponding 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 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 automobiles—particularly, the necessity to handle latency alongside the signal-processing chain. To supply 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 predominant job 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 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 mates, he’s in no hurry to show his interest right into a enterprise. “Making them a industrial product will flip my curiosity to necessity,” he says. “If you do one thing for a dwelling, you do it as a result of it’s a must to and never since you select to.”