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.
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
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