From Self-Driving Cars to Digital Accordions: The Unexpected Harmony of Embedded Systems Engineering
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A Moscow-born engineer working on cutting-edge autonomous vehicle technology in Austin, Texas, is finding creative application for his skills in a surprising place: building bespoke digital accordions. Sergey Antonovich’s journey demonstrates the increasingly interconnected nature of seemingly disparate fields, and how a passion for tinkering can bridge the gap between high-tech innovation and artistic expression.
Antonovich readily admits the accordion isn’t widely considered a “cool” instrument. In fact, it was an instrument chosen for him by his mother when he was eight years old, a pursuit he quickly abandoned as a teenager. Growing up near Moscow, his interests soon shifted toward electronics and the hands-on world of gadgetry, fostered through after-school classes. This early fascination ultimately led to a career focused on embedded systems, with roles spanning environmental monitoring, commercial drone sensors, and, most recently, sensor systems at Avride, an autonomous vehicle research and development hub.
But a rekindled childhood passion proved pivotal. When Antonovich revisited the accordion as an adult, he discovered not only dormant musical ability but also a fresh appreciation for the instrument’s potential. “Like any good tinkerer, he had some ideas about how he could improve it,” and soon began leveraging his electronics expertise to build custom devices.
He’s since found a surprising synergy between his professional and personal life. “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,” Antonovich explains. “Both systems, self-driving cars and accordions, are real-time embedded systems,” he notes, adding that while a self-driving car is more complex in terms of components, the fundamental principles remain largely the same.
From Chekhov to Austin: A Journey in Engineering
Antonovich’s upbringing in Chekhov, a small town outside Moscow, was, by his own account, fairly ordinary. He experienced early loss, with his father passing away when he was just one year old, and was raised by his mother, who worked in the printing industry, and his grandmother, a school principal. At age eight, he began formal music education, learning music theory and the accordion. Though a dutiful student, his passion lay elsewhere.
That “elsewhere” quickly became electronics. After-school classes introduced him to soldering and basic system building, igniting a lifelong passion. He soon progressed to building digital doorbells, code locks, and rudimentary radio receivers in his spare time. His family supported his burgeoning interest, encouraging him to attend a technical secondary school that combined traditional academics with engineering skills.
In 2004, Antonovich enrolled at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, choosing a program that integrated hardware, software, and digital-signal processing. Initially intending to pursue a career in software development, he quickly gravitated toward hardware engineering. “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 Expertise into a Career
Toward the end of his studies in 2009, Antonovich began working for Ecosfera, a Moscow-based company specializing in environmental and labor-safety measurement devices. He continued with the company after graduating in 2010, designing both hardware and software to monitor conditions like temperature, humidity, and wind speed for workplace safety. This role required navigating stringent regulatory requirements and achieving certification for his devices – a significant early career accomplishment.
From there, Antonovich’s career path included a diverse range of embedded and Internet of Things (IoT) systems, encompassing ATMs, medical devices, sensors for commercial drones, and even digital price tags. In 2021, he joined Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine, to contribute to its autonomous vehicle program. He recalls being immediately struck by the reality of self-driving technology. “I remember I was approaching the office entrance and I saw a car which was driving itself,” he says. “You see it on YouTube, but it’s not such an inspiring experience. It’s really inspiring when you see it live.”
A corporate restructuring led to the creation of Avride, and Antonovich transitioned with the autonomous vehicle division. After a year in Israel, he relocated to Avride’s headquarters in Austin in 2024. His current work focuses on the data streams powering the vehicle’s perception algorithms, specifically utilizing radar and lidar sensors. He explains that these sensors complement each other – radar offering long-range detection but lower resolution, while lidar excels at shape recognition within a limited distance. His role involves building diagnostic systems to ensure these sensors operate in perfect synchrony and deliver data within strict time constraints.
The move to the United States has been professionally beneficial, with the country’s more flexible regulatory environment accelerating technological progress. It has also provided a fertile ground for his maker instincts. “As a maker, I would say [the United States] is a paradise,” he notes. “Electronic components are very accessible. You just order them and they arrive very quickly and everything just works.”
A Musical Revival and the Pursuit of Low Latency
Antonovich’s return to the accordion began in 2017, while still living in Russia, sparked by the emergence of new digital accordion models. “I thought, why not try to modify my own [acoustic] accordion?” he recalls. He was pleased to find his musical skills hadn’t completely faded, and he could still play and read sheet music.
He set out to address the common shortcomings of commercially available digital accordions: their bulkiness, reliance on external modules for accompaniment, and restrictive wired connections. “I decided that maybe I can build a self-contained device,” he says. He began by integrating a synthesizer into an acoustic accordion, adding internal microphones to blend acoustic and digital sounds, and incorporating wireless transmitters for greater performance freedom.
Surprisingly, he discovered significant parallels between his work on self-driving cars and his musical endeavors, particularly the critical importance of managing latency. A digital accordion must rapidly process input from numerous buttons and keys, routing it to the synthesizer with minimal delay. “Your main task as a developer is to keep latency as low as possible,” he emphasizes. “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.”
Today, Antonovich has amassed a collection of both hybrid acoustic-digital and fully digital accordions. While he has built instruments for friends, he has no immediate plans to commercialize his creations. “Making them a commercial product will turn my curiosity to necessity,” he explains. “When you do something for a living, you do it because you have to and not because you choose to.”
