Sending a Message to GCS HUD

I apologize in advance if this has been asked before. I tried to do a quick search on the topic, but couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for…

Basically I have a device communicating to my Pixhawk running ArduPlane 3.9.5 via serial. I was curious if there is anyway for me to send a message to my Mission Planner GCS and have it show up on the HUD? I don’t want to edit the default firmware, so adding a new command is out of the question for me.

I thought maybe mavlink_statustext_t could do the trick, but unfortunately that seems to just write to the DataFlash. I was wondering if there is any other solution? It appears from looking at GCS_Common.cpp, it just writes to the data flash and ignores the severity. Is there any other options to get a message to pop up on the HUD. I need to occasionally have my device report back to the GCS.

The message pops up if I do a send_text(severity, char*) (if the severity is high enough of course). But again, I can’t change the Ardupilot code because I need this device to be somewhat universal…

Thanks in advance!

Brian