Armbian Stretch on Orange Pi Zero...nothing

[Kegan Simpson]

I bought an OPi Zero, the extension board, a 1/8-to-rca audio/video cable to plug into the AV jack of the extension board, and a 16 GB SDHC card. Loaded Armbian Stretch onto it, plugged in ethernet without any of the AV stuff just to start. The Pi doesn't even show up on my router settings so I cannot access it via Putty or any other SSH program. I turn it off, attach the extension board and av cable, and plug it into the TV in the hopes that I can start working on something with a USB keyboard...nothing shows up on the TV. I'm hoping that's a software issue and not an issue with the actual extension board I bought. I know for a fact it's loading Armbian because I can actually access it via USB through Arduino IDE, I just can't access it with anything else, and I can't do anything more in the Arduino IDE than execute simple commands, I can't edit a file in nano or vim or do much of anything else with it. Maybe I can use "echo -e" to write some important config files but I don't know what they would even be and I don't know why it just isn't working in the first place. I'm trying to perform the same steps I see in Youtube videos about the board and I'm not even getting past being able to control it remotely.

[Kegan Simpson]

Update: getting a little bit closer but still stuck. Here's what happened

Reformatted SD card with fresh Armbian Stretch

plugged it in to PC via USB because again, OPi Zero does not want to appear on the router's list. the goal is SSH via USB

login via Arduino IDE

moved the stock /etc/network/interfaces file to a backup file and created a new interfaces file that reads:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto usb0
iface usb0 inet static
	address 192.168.100.1
	netmask 255.255.255.0

and switched out the /etc/modules file that originally says "g_serial" with one that says "g_ether"

reboot OPi, shows up as RNDIS Gadget on Windows. I go into the settings to change the IPv4 to 192.168.100.1 manually. It goes from "Unidentified Network" to "Network, Shared". I assume that means everything is ok so far.

I open a cmd line in Windows and type ipconfig. The RNDIS Gadget shows up with the 192.168.100.1 address as default gateway and uses some automatically configured IP that I've never seen...ok...so I open PuTTY using both the 192.168.100.1 and the automatically configure IP, they both give me a big fat "Connection Refused." I've never seen anyone complain about this, why is it happening here? Is there something I need to configure for SSH on the Pi side or what?