Please compare with http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1851-rfc-make-armbian-more-iot-friendly/
Might be worth a try adding a group gpio, adding your user to this group and putting
chown -R root:gpio /sys/class/gpio && chmod -R 770 /sys/class/gpio
into /etc/rc.local prior to "exit 0". Adding group gpio and a user to it should be possible this way:
sudo su -
addgroup gpio
usermod -aG gpio ${SUDO_USER}
(log out and in afterwards)