When Sergey Antonovich rediscovered a childhood passion for music, he found an unexpected application for his skills as an embedded systems engineer: building bespoke digital accordions.
Antonovich admits the accordion isn’t the coolest instrument. It was chosen for him by his mother when he was 8, and he quickly lost interest as a teenager. While growing up close to Moscow, his adolescent passions were instead channeled into electronics and tinkering with gadgets in after-school classes. This led to a career working on environmental-monitoring devices, sensors for commercial drones, and most recently, sensor systems at autonomous-vehicle developer Avride’s R&D hub in Austin, Texas.
Sergey Antonovich
Employer
Avride
Occupation
Embedded systems developer
Education
Master’s degree in engineering physics, Moscow Engineering Physics Institute
But when Antonovich picked his accordion back up as an adult, he discovered both latent musical skills and a newfound appreciation for the instrument. Like any good tinkerer, he had some ideas about how he could improve it and he soon began using his electronics knowledge to build custom devices.
And Antonovich says he’s found a surprising harmony between his day job and his hobby. Whether you’re ensuring that an autonomous vehicle spots obstacles in the road in time or translating a musician’s nimble finger work into a melodious tune, you need to rapidly process digital signals from the underlying hardware.
“Both systems, self-driving cars and accordions, are real-time embedded systems,” says Antonovich. “A self-driving car is more complicated because it contains many more components, but the principles are more or less equal.”
Electronics Trumps Music
Antonovich grew up in Chekhov, a small town outside Moscow, and says he had a pretty ordinary childhood. His father passed away when he was only 1, so he was brought up by his mother, who worked in the printing industry, and his grandmother, a school principal who taught Russian.
At 8 he was enrolled in a local music school where he learned the fundamentals of music theory and the accordion. He was a dutiful student, he says, but never felt much passion for the instrument his mother picked for him and stopped playing when he was about 15.
[embedded content] Sergey Antonovich shows off the digital instruments he makes in his free time. With one lightweight instrument, he becomes a one-man band. Sergey Antonovich
That was also when Antonovich had his first encounter with the world of electronics. He started attending after-school classes where he was taught to solder and build simple electronic systems. Antonovich quickly caught the bug and was soon knocking together digital doorbells, code locks, and basic radio receivers in his spare time.
His family encouraged him to enroll at a technical secondary school, which taught engineering skills alongside the standard curriculum. When it came to picking a university, he decided he wanted a grounding in physics, so he enrolled at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in 2004, choosing a program that taught a combination of hardware, software, and digital-signal processing.
Antonovich originally planned to become a software developer but quickly fell in love with hardware. “When you develop software, there is a level of abstraction between you and the thing itself,” he says. “But when you work with hardware, you understand how this particular thing actually works.”
Embedding Into a Career
Toward the end of his degree studies, in 2009, Antonovich started working for Moscow-based Ecosfera, a company focused on environmental and labor-safety measurement devices. He continued working for the company after graduating in 2010, designing hardware and software to measure conditions like temperature, humidity, and wind speed to ensure safe workplaces.
It was a niche field, but one with strict regulatory requirements, and he had to shepherd his devices through rigorous certification procedures, the first major accomplishment of his career. From there, he worked for a variety of companies on different embedded and Internet of Things systems, including ATMs, medical devices, sensors for commercial drones, and digital price tags. Then in 2021 he interviewed at internet company Yandex, which operates Russia’s most popular search engine, to work on its autonomous vehicle program.
“I remember I was approaching the office entrance and I saw a car which was driving itself,” Antonovich says. “You see it on YouTube, but it’s not such an inspiring experience. It’s really inspiring when you see it live.”
He got the job and started work as a software engineer developing vehicle sensor systems and testing infrastructure. A corporate restructuring saw Yandex’s autonomous vehicle division spun off as a new company called Avride. Antonovich worked for the company in Israel for about a year, then in 2024 moved to its new headquarters in Austin.
Antonovich says he works at Arvide primarily on the data that feed the vehicle’s perception algorithms, which includes radar and lidar. Both kinds of sensors have strengths and weaknesses—radar has long range but low resolution, while lidar is great at picking out shapes but only up to a certain distance—so the algorithmic perception system combines the data. Antonovich’s job is to build the diagnostic systems that ensure these sensors are working in perfect synchrony and deliver data within tight time limits.
In his day job, Antonovich works on the sensor systems for self-driving cars. Sergey Antonovich
Moving to the United States has been a positive change for Antonovich. On a professional front, the country’s soft-touch regulatory approach toward autonomous vehicles has allowed the company to make rapid progress on its technology. But he says the move has also helped him indulge his tinkering instincts in his spare time.
“As a maker, I would say [the United States] is a paradise,” he says. “Electronic components are very accessible. You just order them and they arrive very quickly and everything just works.” Antonovich has taken full advantage of this to dive into his other passion—building musical instruments.
A Musical Repris
In 2017, when he was still living in Russia, Antonovich noticed a new generation of digital accordions emerging and it sparked his curiosity. “I thought, why not try to modify my own [acoustic] accordion?” he says.
He dusted off his instrument and was gratified to find that he could still play and read sheet music. So, he tried to tackle some of the problems that beset digital accordions. Commercially available instruments are typically large and heavy, rely on bulky external modules to add musical accompaniment such as a drum beat, and connect to amplifiers with wires that restrict the performer’s movement.
“I decided that maybe I can build a self-contained device,” he says. Starting with an acoustic accordion as a base, he added a synthesizer, installed internal microphones to capture acoustic sounds that could then be blended with digital ones, and integrated wireless transmitters that could free performers from cables and let them move about the stage freely.
Surprisingly, Antonovich found a lot of overlap with his work on self-driving cars—in particular, the need to manage latency along the signal-processing chain. To provide a seamless experience to the player, a digital accordion needs to rapidly route input from dozens of buttons and keys on two separate keyboards to the synthesizer, which has its own processing delay.
“Your main task as a developer is to keep latency as low as possible,” he says. “A high quality system should produce sound in less than 10 milliseconds, and if you come over this threshold it’s very uncomfortable to play.”
Antonovich now has a growing menagerie of both hybrid acoustic-digital and fully digital accordions. But while he’s built accordions for friends, he’s in no hurry to turn his hobby into a business. “Making them a commercial product will turn my curiosity to necessity,” he says. “When you do something for a living, you do it because you have to and not because you choose to.”
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