Engineer Builds Accordions and Autonomous Car System

When Sergey Antonovich rediscovering his childhood passion for music, he found unexpected use for his skills as embedded systems engineer: creating custom digital accordions.

Antonovich admits that the accordion is not the coolest instrument. It was chosen for him by his mother when he was 8 years old and he quickly lost interest as a teenager. When he was growing up near Moscow, his youthful hobbies were focused on electronics and tinkering with gadgets in extracurricular activities. This led to a career working on environmental monitoring devices, sensors for commercial use. dronesand most recently sensor systems from a self-driving vehicle developer AvrideResearch and Development Center in Austin, Texas.

But when Antonovich, now an adult, picked up his accordion again, he discovered both latent musical abilities and a newfound love for the instrument. Like any good craftsman, he had some ideas on how it could be improved, and soon began using his knowledge of electronics to create custom devices.

And Antonovich says that he has found an amazing harmony between his daily work and his hobby. Whether you're ensuring a self-driving car detects obstacles on the road in time or turning a musician's deft fingerwork into a melodic tune, you need to quickly process digital signals from key equipment.

“Both systems driverless cars and accordions are real-time embedded systems,” says Antonovich. “A self-driving car is more complex because it contains many more components, but the principles are more or less the same.”

Electronics beats music

Antonovich grew up in Chekhov, a small town near Moscow, and says he had a fairly ordinary childhood. His father died when he was only 1 year old, so he was raised by his mother, who worked in the printing industry, and his grandmother, a school director who taught Russian.

At the age of 8, he was enrolled in a local music school, where he learned the basics of music theory and playing the accordion. He was a good student, he said, but never had much passion for the instrument his mother chose for him and stopped playing when he was about 15.

Sergey Antonovich demonstrates the digital tools that he makes in his free time. With one light instrument, he becomes a one-man orchestra. Sergey Antonovich

It was then that Antonovich first encountered the world of electronics. He began taking extracurricular classes where he was taught how to solder and assemble simple electronic systems. Antonovich quickly discovered the error and soon assembled digital doorbells, combination locks and simple radios in his free time.

His family advised him to enroll in a technical high school, where they taught engineering skills parallel to the standard curriculum. When it came to choosing a university, he decided that he wanted to gain knowledge in physics, so he entered Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in 2004 chose a program that taught a combination of hardware, software and digital signal processing.

Antonovich initially planned to become a software developer, but quickly fell in love with hardware. “When you develop software, there is a certain level of abstraction between you and the product itself,” he says. “But when you work with the hardware, you understand how that particular thing actually works.”

Career introduction

Towards the end of his studies, in 2009, Antonovich began working for a Moscow company. Ecospherecompany specializing in environmental and occupational safety measurement devices. After graduating in 2010, he continued to work for the company, developing hardware and software for measuring conditions such as temperature, humidity, and temperature. wind speed provide safe workplaces.

It was a niche field, but with strict regulatory requirements, and he had to put his devices through strict certification processes, which was the first major achievement of his career. After that, he worked for various companies on various embedded and Internet of Things systems, including ATMs, medical equipmentsensors for commercial drones and digital price tags. Then in 2021 he gave an interview in Internet company Yandexwhich manages the most popular in Russia search engineto work on its autonomous vehicle program.

“I remember I was approaching the entrance to the office and saw a car that was driving itself,” says Antonovich. “You see it on YouTubebut it's not such an inspiring experience. It’s really inspiring to see it in person.”

He got the job and began working as a software engineer developing automotive sensor systems and testing infrastructure. As a result of corporate restructuring, Yandex's self-driving vehicle division was spun off into a new company called Avride. Antonovich worked in a company in the city. Israel for about a year, then moved to new headquarters in Austin in 2024.

Antonovich says he works at Arvide primarily on data that shapes how a car is perceived. algorithmswhich includes radar and lidar. Both types of sensors have their strengths and weaknesses: radar has a long range but low resolution, and lidar perfectly distinguishes shapes, but only up to a certain distance, so the algorithmic perception system combines the data. Antonovich's goal is to create diagnostic systems that ensure that these sensors work perfectly in sync and provide data in a timely manner.

In his day job, Antonovich works on sensor systems for self-driving cars. Sergey Antonovich

Moving to United States was a positive change for Antonovich. On the professional front, the country's soft regulatory approach to autonomous vehicles allowed the company to make rapid progress in its technology. But he says the move has also helped him indulge his instincts to tinker in his spare time.

“As a creator, I would say [the United States] “This is paradise,” he says. — Electronic components are very affordable. You just order them and they arrive very quickly and everything just works.” Antonovich took full advantage of this to immerse himself in his other passion – creating musical instruments.

The musical has resumed

In 2017, when he was still living in RussiaAntonovich noticed a new generation digital accordions appeared and this piqued his curiosity. “I thought, why not try to change my own [acoustic] accordion? he says.

He dusted off his instrument and was pleased to find that he could still play and read music. So, he tried to solve some of the problems that digital accordions face. Commercially available instruments tend to be large and heavy, and use bulky external modules to add musical accompaniment, such as drum beats, and connect to amplifiers with wires limiting the performer's movements.

“I decided that maybe I could create a self-contained device,” he says. Starting with an acoustic accordion as a base, he added a synthesizer, installed an internal microphones to capture acoustic sounds that could then be mixed with digital ones, and built-in wireless connectivity transmitters this could free performers from cables and allow them to move freely around the stage.

Surprisingly, Antonovich found many overlaps with his work on self-driving cars, in particular the need to manage latency in the signal processing chain. To ensure a smooth player experience, the digital accordion needs to quickly route input from dozens of buttons and keys on two separate keyboards to the synthesizer, which has its own processing latency.

“Your main goal as a developer is to reduce latency as much as possible,” he says. “A high-quality system should produce sound in less than 10 milliseconds, and if you go past that threshold it will be very uncomfortable to play.”

Antonovich now has a growing menagerie of both hybrid acoustic-digital and all-digital accordions. But while he collects accordions for friends, he is in no hurry to turn his hobby into a business. “Turning them into a commercial product will turn my curiosity into a necessity,” he says. “When you do something for a living, you do it because you have to, not because you want to.”