Skittles and Solenoids

Before we go off on our holidays, I've been thinking about the skittles challenge - we will be trying to add some extra 'kick' to the ball when we reach the halfway line.  To do that, I'm hoping we can use a solenoid connected to a lever (most solenoids I have seen only move around 1cm, so we can hopefully attach a lever to give us a bit more oomph).  I've not done anything with solenoids before, so this instructable (admittedly for an arduino) has given me some ideas about how everything goes together.

Controlling solenoids with arduino

I also found a youtube video of a raspberry pi connected to a solenoid - here's hoping we can acheive something similar

We'll be back in a couple of weeks, when we will start to build our diddyborg